What is a committed expense vs. a day-to-day expense?

There are two types of expenses within Weekly – committed and day-to-day expenses.

An expense is considered “committed” if it happens at a regular interval for a known amount. Subscriptions, bills, and loan payments are examples of committed expenses. Savings goals are also considered committed expenses. Since these expenses are for a defined amount they’re easy to budget for.

Day-to-day expenses are expenses for things you purchase that don’t have a set amount or are affected by the choices you make through your week. Day-to-day expenses often take place at unpredictable times, have variable costs and are based on in the moment needs and decisions. So in this group are things like gas, groceries, clothing and entertainment.

Weekly takes your regular income and subtracts all of your committed expenses to discover your Weekly Spending Limit.  Each week the amount of our Weekly Spending Limit is added to your Safe-to-Spend for the week.  Your Safe-to-Spend is used to cover all your day-to-day expenses.

Many budgeting apps ask you to estimate how much money you’ll spend on day-to-day expenses. We believe this approach adds unnecessary complexity to your budget. Instead Weekly has a single bucket for all of your day-to-day expenses – your Safe-to-Spend – but broken down into a weekly amount so you don’t spend too much at any one time. At the beginning of each week, your Safe-to-Spend is increased by your Weekly Spending Limit so you can take budgeting one week at a time.

For more detail on this please read the Knowledge Base article: “The Two Types of Expenses – Committed vs Day-toDay“.