You might just be started with Weekly and entered all your budget items into the app but your Weekly Spending Limit seems wrong. Perhaps you think it looks too large (“There’s no way I can spend that much each week and hit all my goals?!”) or too small or even negative (“So, I can spend negative dollars this week? What’s going on?”).
Things to Check if your Weekly Spending Limit seems inaccurate.
Here are the things to check to make sure your Weekly Spending Limit is accurate.
Check your last 30 days of transaction in your credit card and bank account
Login to your online banking and peruse your last 30 days credit card and checking transactions for anything that it a regular expense that you might have missed.
Think about bills you might pay quarterly or yearly and make sure to add those
Don’t forget to think about bills that happens at non-monthly intervals. For example, pool dues or insurance might be paid quarterly or yearly. Weekly supports many different intervals so whatever whenever your bill reoccurs we should have you covered.
Check your pay interval
Check your paycheck interval to make sure it is accurate. Remember bi-weekly is different than twice a month.
Here’s how to add any recurring expenses you missed
If you find recurring bills you missed, you can add it into Weekly at any time in one of three ways.
- Re-launch the setup process – You can relaunch the onboarding process to add in new items. Simply tap the menu on the top left, go to “Settings” then select the “Review budget items”. This will launch the same on-boarding flow you filled out when you first downloaded Weekly but with all the items you have already entered intact.
- Add budget item from the “Budget” screen – You can tap the menu on the top left, selecting “Budget”, then hitting the (+) icon.
- Add the budget items “on the fly” when you add a transaction – When you add a new expense transaction, either manually or from a bank download, you have the option to “Create a new item” when assigning it to a recurring expense. If you choose this option, it will be added into your budget and your current and future Safe-to-Spend amounts will be adjusted (it will not adjust the past Safe-t0-Spend amounts).
Now that you have checked everything, do things seems still off?
“I have done all of these things but my Weekly Spending Limit is way too low / 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.
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.
“I have too much money to spend, this seems dangerous!”
Congrats! You are in a positive financial situation. Consider setting up a fund to save for retirement or other life goal. Once you decide how much you want to save, Weekly will take this out of your Weekly Spending Limit before it is added to your current Safe-to-Spend.
Happy budgeting!