Paycheck Insights

A section of the dashboard deals specifically with your income — how well the plan's assumptions about your pay have held up, and what's left in the plan.

Budgeted vs Actual Paycheck Amount

Your planned paycheck against what actually arrived.

When you built your budget you entered an income figure, and every projection rests on it. This compares that assumption to reality.

Small variance is normal — a slightly different tax withholding, a week with a few hours of overtime. What matters is the direction over time:

• ›Actual consistently below budgeted — your plan is built on income you don't receive. Every projected date in it is optimistic. Rebuild with the real figure.
• ›Actual consistently above budgeted — you have more room than the plan knows about, which is a pleasant problem. Rebuilding may open up more aggressive tiers than you were originally offered.
• ›Highly variable — worth entering a conservative figure and treating the good periods as surplus rather than trying to plan around an average you rarely hit.

This is the single most valuable chart for deciding whether it's time to rebuild.

Number of Paychecks Left

How many pay periods remain in your plan.

Concrete in a way that dates aren't. "March 2031" is abstract; "fourteen more paychecks" is something you can feel. It's especially motivating late in a plan, when the count starts dropping into single digits.

It also tells you when you're approaching the end of your plan window and should be thinking about building the next one.

Historical Insights

Your income history summarized three ways:

Lowest Monthly Income — your worst month. This is the one to build around if your income varies. A plan that survives your lowest month is a plan that survives.

Highest Monthly Income — your best month. Useful context, dangerous as a planning assumption. On a bi-weekly cycle your highest months are often just the ones containing three paychecks.

Average Monthly Income — the middle. The reasonable planning figure for most people with steady pay.

The gap between lowest and highest is the number to actually read here. A narrow gap means steady income and you can plan tightly. A wide gap means the average is misleading and you should be planning nearer the low end.

Using this section

Come here when you're deciding whether to rebuild. The rest of the dashboard tells you how you've been spending; this tells you whether the foundation the plan was built on is still true.

The order of questions:

1. ›Is actual income tracking budgeted? If not, that's your rebuild trigger.
2. ›Is the lowest-to-highest spread wider than the plan assumes?
3. ›How many paychecks are left — is the plan nearly done anyway?

If the answer to the first is "it's drifted," go to Editing & Rebuilding a Budget.

Debts Do Not Complete

If your debts aren't projected to clear within the plan window, the dashboard says so directly.

It's not an error. It means that at the current allocation, the balances outlast the plan. Usually one of three things is true: the plan tier is gentler than your debt load needs, the surplus is genuinely too thin, or a debt was entered with the wrong interest rate.

Check the rates first — that's the most common cause and the easiest to fix. See Debts.