Income & Current Savings

The Income section sets the size of everything else. It's also where you set the date the entire plan is built around.

Adding an income source

Each income entry takes:

›Amount — what you receive
›Frequency — how often you receive it, including weekly and other common pay cycles
›Next payday — the date of your next payment

You can add as many sources as you have. A single salaried job is one entry; a job plus regular freelance work is two.

Why next payday matters more than it looks

BetterBudgets doesn't organize your budget by calendar month. It organizes it by paycheck, and it counts pay periods forward from the next payday you enter here.

Get this date wrong and every bill in your plan lands on the wrong paycheck. The totals will still be right, but the timing — which is the whole point of paycheck budgeting — won't be. It's worth double-checking against your actual pay calendar.

If you're paid weekly or bi-weekly, this is also where the app earns its keep: those cycles drift against the calendar, so some months contain an extra paycheck. The plan accounts for that automatically once the anchor date is right.

Current Savings

Current Savings is your starting balance — the money you have right now, today. It is not a target and not a monthly contribution.

The app uses it as the opening position for the savings projection in every plan. If you enter zero when you actually have $3,000 set aside, every plan will show you reaching your milestones later than you really will.

Amounts: what figure to enter

Enter what actually arrives in your account. The projections are built against real available money, so a take-home figure is what the plan needs.

If you're not sure what your take-home will be — you're starting a new job, changing your withholding, or moving somewhere new — use the Paycheck Calculator to estimate it from your gross pay, filing status, and location, then bring that number back here.

Irregular income

If your income varies, enter a conservative average rather than a good month. The plan is a commitment schedule; building it on your best month produces a plan that fails in an ordinary one.

For income you can't predict at all — bonuses, tax refunds, occasional side work — leave it out of this section entirely. Treat it as a windfall when it arrives and put it against a debt or into savings then. A plan that doesn't depend on money you might not get is a plan you can keep.

Tips

›Add every recurring source, even small ones. They compound across a ten-year projection.
›Re-check next payday if you change jobs or your employer shifts the pay cycle.
›Update this section after a raise and rebuild — a raise changes which plans are available to you, not just the numbers in them.

Continue to Housing.