Weekly is designed to change behavior. It does this by giving you one financial number to concentrate on: your Safe-to-Spend amount. Your Safe-to-Spend amount is the amount of money you can feel good about spending knowing that it’s there and spending it will not wreck your finances or keep you from meeting your financial goals. Day-to-day transactions come out of your Safe-to-Spend amount, and you’ll always know how much money you have left to spend for the week.
But Weekly is also a spending tracker. By categorizing your Safe-to-Spend transactions, you can discover spending trends. But we strive to keep the categorization process simple and enjoyable, providing your with suggestions but allowing you to create your suggestion rules. After a short time you will be humming along reviewing many transactions on one screen by tapping them one-at-a-time.
Tracker Page
This is the page where you see what you can safely spend at any given moment, what you have spent in the past week, what your current Allowance is, and whether you have applied your Rollover. Let’s break down each part of this page.
Your “Safe to Spend” Amount
The Safe-to-Spend amount is what you can feel comfortable spending through the end of the week. It already takes into account the recurring expenses and savings goals that you have entered as part of your onboarding as well as your day-to-day transactions and rollover Allowance from previous weeks (see below).
To get your Safe-to-Spend amount, start with your Allowance, add in your Rollover, and subtract any day-to-day transactions that you’ve entered.
Safe to Spend = Allowance + Rollover — Spent
Let’s break these numbers down a bit more.
Allowance
Your weekly Allowance is what you start the week with to spend and each new week your Safe-to-Spend number will start with your Allowance number.
Your Allowance is your recurring income minus your recurring expenses and savings goals divided out into a weekly average. (For more information on how we calculate your weekly Allowance please see the Guide “Finding Your Allowance”)
Rollover
When a week ends, one of three things will have happened in regards to your Allowance. You will either have spent less than your weekly Allowance, more than your weekly Allowance or exactly your weekly Allowance.
The amount of money you have left over at the end of any given week (or not left over as the case may be) is called your Rollover.
In Weekly, you can choose to add last week’s surplus or shortfall to this week’s Safe-to-Spend number by tapping on the rollover number itself. If you happened to have underspent the week before, then you can choose to apply that to the current week’s Safe-to-Spend number to boost up the amount of money you can spend this week. If you over-spent in the previous week, you can keep yourself on track by turning on the rollover feature, which will reduce Safe-to-Spend number for the week.
Spent
Spent is a total of your day-to-day expenses for things like groceries and gas in any given week. These purchases will reduce your Safe-to-Spend amount, and the tracker page will show you exactly how much you have left to spend. All of your day-to-day transactions for the week, get added together to make up your spent number.
Entering Transactions
You enter day-to-day transactions by clicking the blue “+Add” button on the Tracker Screen. This will prompt you to enter a transaction. Type in what the transaction was, then pick the date of the transaction in the slider at the bottom. The transaction will be entered, show up on the Tracker Page, and reduce your Safe-to-Spend amount.
Please note: Let’s say you received a bonus at work or some birthday cash. If you want to add this money to your safe to spend you can do that as well. Simply select “Income” at the top of the transaction screen.
If you connect Weekly to your bank or credit card account, Weekly will download your transactions for you and then you will be able to add them to your “Safe-To-Spend”, mark them as Recurring or Ignore them altogether.
What to do if you are over or under budget
If you’re continuing to be under budget week after week, this is great news! You might consider setting a more aggressive savings goal. You can either update your current savings goal or add one by going through the onboarding process. To do this, select the icon with three dots in the bottom right hand corner of the app, then select “Redo Onboarding.” By setting up a savings goal for emergency savings, a house, or a vacation, you can smooth out rough patches in your financial life and start to build wealth!
If you’re continuing to be over budget week after week, then here are four options to get back on track.
- Reduce recurring expenses — Consider how you can reduce some of your recurring expenses. Can you take a roommate? If you have a car loan, could you sell your car and getting a less expensive one? Look over your recurring expenses and try to eliminate or reduce them.
- Increase recurring income — Increasing recurring income might mean asking for a raise at work, finding a new position at a new company that pays more, or taking on a second job.
- Increase one-time income and reduce debt — You can take temporary jobs for more income. This will give you more money to spend on a weekly basis and if you apply it to your debt, give you a higher Allowance.
- Reduce spending — The fourth way is to spend less on your day-to-day transactions. For example, if you are eating out a great deal, could you cook more at home. Could you take the bus to work instead of having a car? It’s not glamorous but it’s effective. Your reward will be in hitting your savings goals and having enough money to go on that vacation!
Practice Makes Perfect
Remember, whether you have money left over or you spent a little too much, your weekly Allowance is added into your Safe-to-Spend amount each week. You may have a little more or less if you have the rollover feature turned on, or it will start completely fresh if you have the feature turned off. Because your weekly Allowance is added in again each Sunday, you have 52 chances to start over in a year (rather than the 12 you’d have with traditional budgeting systems). Going from no budgeting system (or an old system) to the Weekly budgeting system may take some time to get used to, but you don’t need to fret if you make mistakes because you can start again each week.
