Budgeting is all about habits. Building any successful habit takes effort but the right tool can make all the difference. Weekly is designed to support your natural patterns to make it easier to develop good budgeting habits.
Many budgeting apps break your income and expenses into monthly categories. But there are two reasons this does not work well.
1. A month is too long
Most people will overspend in the first few weeks.
2. Recurring and day-to-day expenses should be separated.
Recurring and day-to-day expenses are very different but most apps categorize them the same way. Recurring expenses are predictable and often happen monthly. Day-to-day spending is constantly happening and can fluctuate a lot. Approaching these separately makes it much easier to stay on budget.
Budget a week at a time
Budgeting one week at a time makes it a lot easier to get into a pattern staying within your limit. The consistency of a week (seven days with one weekend) makes it easier to plan for and more closely matches how we live life.
Weeks also happen 52 times per year. That gives you a lot of opportunities to check in and make sure you’re on track.
Use a weekly spending limit
Most budgeting apps ignore the difference between recurring expenses and day-to-day spending. They ask you to make one category for “car payment” and another category for “eating out”. But these two expenses are very different. A car payment is a specific amount that you can easily plan for. You set it up once when you buy a car and then it likely never changes. Day to day spending (like groceries, shopping and eating out) happen all the time. These decisions can happen multiple times a day and can throw your budget off.
This distinction is foundational to how Weekly works. Since recurring expenses are fairly consistent and easy to predict, we start by subtracting them from your regular income. We also subtract any of your savings goals from your income to find out how much money is left for day-to-day spending. We convert that remaining amount into a weekly average that we call your weekly spending limit. This amount is added to your Safe-to-Spend at the beginning of each week.
Anyone can budget weekly
Weekly budgeting works even if you aren’t paid weekly. Learn how Weekly averages your income and expenses to find your weekly spending limit.