Budget Builder Overview
The Budget Builder is where BetterBudgets does its actual work. You name the budget, describe your finances across four sections, tap Calculate, and the app returns a set of complete plans projected forward on your pay schedule.
The name and the four sections
At the top of the Builder are two fields: Budget Name (required) and Description (Optional). See Naming Your Budget.
Below them are four sections, in this order:
Income — your current savings, an optional emergency fund goal, and every source of pay with how often it lands and when. See Income & Current Savings.
Housing — rent or mortgage, plus the bills that come with a home: utilities, internet, insurance, HOA. See Housing.
Expenses — everything else you pay for on a schedule: groceries, gas, subscriptions, spending money. See Expenses.
Debt — every balance you're paying down, with its payment, due date, and rate. This is the one section you can leave empty. See Debts.
Each section shows its items as a list. Tap Add income, Add bill, Add expense, or Add debt to open a sheet for a new item, tap an existing item to edit it, or swipe it left and tap the trash to delete it.
Reading the top of the screen
The net pill next to the budget name is your monthly income minus housing, expenses, and debt payments. Its color also tells you roughly how many plans you'll get back: green for the full set, orange for two, red for one.
The track under the title has one segment per section with its monthly total. Grey is empty, green is complete, and amber means something needs attention — an item with a dot is missing a name or an amount. Tap a segment to jump to that section.
Amounts are entered as they occur, not per month. The Builder converts weekly, biweekly, quarterly, and yearly amounts to a monthly figure for the totals.
What happens when you tap Calculate
The line under Calculate names the first thing that's missing. When you tap it, the app checks that:
- ›the budget has a name
- ›at least one income has an amount above zero
- ›there's at least one entry in Housing, Expenses, or Debt
- ›no two items share a name
- ›your monthly income is greater than your monthly bills and debt payments
Then it works out how much each paycheck has left after housing, expenses, and debt payments, and explores different ways of spending that surplus. Put more of it toward debt and you finish sooner but save less along the way. Put more toward savings and the reverse.
Rather than picking one answer, the Builder returns several plans at different intensities so you can choose the tradeoff yourself.
What you get back
With room in your budget, you get five plans:
- ›Minimum Effort
- ›Slightly Aggressive
- ›Aggressive
- ›Extremely Aggressive
- ›Maximum Effort
When your debt payments already take up most of what's left, you get two — Minimum Effort and Aggressive. When there's only one workable path, you'll see a single plan called The Only Way if you have debts, or The Plan if you don't.
The results screen leads with a recommended plan, then a chart, a table comparing every plan, and a detail card for the one you've selected.
Full detail: Understanding Your Results.
Accuracy and where it matters
The plan is a projection built entirely from your inputs, so it inherits their errors. Not all inputs matter equally:
- ›Debt balances and interest rates matter most. They drive the payoff order, and a wrong rate can reorder the whole plan.
- ›Income and housing matter a lot, because they set the size of the surplus everything else works from.
- ›Variable expenses matter least. A grocery estimate that's off by $40 will not meaningfully change your results.
Round where you must, but don't deliberately understate expenses to make the projected dates look better. The plan will simply be one you can't follow.
Free plan limits in the Builder
On Free, the Builder allows 1 income source, rent plus 5 housing bills, 2 expenses, and 2 debts, and bills and expenses can only be Monthly. The add row in each section shows how many you've used. Thrive allows up to 5 income sources, unlimited bills, expenses, and debts, and every frequency. See What's Included with Thrive.
Rebuilding
Nothing here is locked in. When your income changes, a debt gets paid off, or you move, you can reopen a budget's inputs in the Builder and calculate again. Every budget you've built is kept in the Archive.