Weekly is different from most other budgeting apps. Many other tools track your income and expenses month over month. Some apps provide a spending amount based on your checking account balance and upcoming bills and income.
Although these approaches have merit – we believe that budgeting can be simplified to better support our psychological patterns as humans. Using an average weekly Safe-to-Spend amount gives you the same amount of money to spend every week. This simple change helps create healthy patterns of regular spending and avoids the spending roller coaster that’s common when trying to tackle spending a whole month at a time.
With Weekly, you’re able to check in with your budget and make adjustments every seven days. Monthly budgets only provide a restart 12 times per year. These regular check-ins help to quickly identify when your spending is going off the rails and can help get you back on track.
So, when you first put in your regular income and committed expenses, Weekly determines that their weekly equivalent is. So for example, if you get paid $2,500 twice a month that is the equivalent of $1,150.68 per week.
We do the same with your committed expenses. $70 a month in internet access expenses is the equivalent of $16.11 per week.
Weekly then subtracts all your weekly income from all your weekly expenses to get your weekly spending limit for you discretionary spending.
What using averages means is that the amount you are given to spend is divorced from the up-and-down swings of cash in the bank. So when you get a big boost in your checking account when a paycheck comes in, your Weekly Spending Limit remains unchanged. At the same time if you bank account is lower, you will still have the same amount to spend each week. This keep the emotional rollercoaster of spending in check.