If your Weekly Spending Limit is in the negative, there are two situation that can make this occur:
You live off of irregular or lumpy income.
If your Weekly Spending Limit is too low or negative you may be dealing with “lumpy” income and using that to pay off your regular expenses. This is not necessarily a bad thing and there are a couple ways to handle this situation. You can …
- Deal with the negative amount until your lumpy income comes in and then add that to your Safe-to-Spend each time. You can also rollover any positive end-of-week balances to the next week.
- Estimate what you confidently think is a floor for your irregular income and add that as recurring income budget item. When the real amount of income comes in you can
- Update the recurring income item to be the current amount of the check. This will adjust your Safe-to-Spend in the current and future weeks.
- Don’t update the recurring item but then manually add an income transaction for the difference and add that to your Safe-to-Spend or a fund.
See more details in our article about how to handle variable income.
Your living situation is not sustainable
If your Weekly Spending Limit is too low or negative you may just not be in a sustainable financial situation. You need to reduce your regular expenses or increase your income or both.