Editing & Rebuilding a Budget
A budget is a projection from a snapshot of your finances. When the snapshot stops matching reality, rebuild it.
When to rebuild
Rebuild when the inputs change:
- ›Your income changes — raise, new job, hours change, a side income starts or stops
- ›You move, or your rent or mortgage changes
- ›You take on a new debt
- ›A debt is paid off entirely
- ›A major recurring expense appears or disappears
Don't rebuild for:
- ›A single month where you overspent
- ›A one-off expense
- ›Falling behind for a few weeks
Those aren't input changes, they're normal variance. Rebuilding every time a month goes sideways gives you a stack of near-identical budgets and no continuity in your tracking. Let the plan absorb the noise.
How to edit
Open the budget and edit whichever section needs it — the same five sections you filled in originally. Change your inputs, then recalculate.
The app rebuilds the full set of plans from the revised inputs. This isn't a patch of your existing plan; it's a fresh calculation, so the available tiers may differ from what you saw before. A raise can open up plans that weren't offered previously.
You'll choose a plan again from the new results. See Understanding Your Results.
What happens to your tracking
Bills you've already marked complete stay complete. Rebuilding changes the plan going forward — it doesn't erase the history of what you've already paid.
That said, if you change something structural, expect your paycheck periods to shift. Changing your next payday in particular re-anchors the whole schedule, since every pay period is counted forward from that date.
Rebuilding vs. building new
You have two options, and they're for different situations.
Edit the existing budget when your real circumstances have changed and the old plan is simply out of date. There's one current truth, and you're updating it.
Build a new budget when you want to compare — you're exploring a move, pricing a car, or wondering what would happen if you dropped a few subscriptions. Keeping these separate means you can look at them side by side in the Archive rather than overwriting the plan you're actually living on.
Name and annotate exploratory budgets clearly. If we move to Denver with notes explaining the assumptions is worth far more later than a fourth entry called New Budget. See Naming Your Budget.
Multiple saved budgets is a Thrive feature. See What's Included with Thrive.
Restoring an older budget
Past budgets aren't gone. Any budget in the Archive can be restored and made active again — useful when you built something exploratory, switched to it, and want to go back.
See Your Active Budget.
Modeling a purchase before committing
If the change you're considering is a purchase rather than something that's already happened, price it first. The calculators exist for this, and several can push their result straight into the Builder with Add To Budget — so you can see the real effect on your timeline before you sign anything.
See Calculators Overview.