Paycheck Insights

At the bottom of the dashboard is the Breakdowns card: Income, Savings, Housing, Expenses and Debt, each a row you tap to open. Only the sections your budget actually has appear — a plan with no debt has no Debt row.

Each row shows a figure on the right for the current month: on budget when it's within $25 of the plan, otherwise the difference, green when it's good news and red when it isn't.

The Income row is where you check how your pay is holding up and what's left in the plan.

Income at a glance

Open Income and the first thing you see is a grid of figures, all built from your paychecks at their current amounts:

This month, Last month, Next month — the total of the paychecks dated in each calendar month.

Average — the average monthly total, across every month up to and including this one.

High · Low — your best and worst months so far, side by side.

Paychecks left — how many paychecks in the plan are still ahead of today.

High, low and average

Low is 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.

High is 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 is the middle. The reasonable planning figure for most people with steady pay.

The gap between high and low 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.

Paychecks left

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.

Budgeted vs Actual Paycheck Amount

Under the figures is a chart with two lines — Budgeted (dashed) and Actual (solid) — for each paycheck up to the next one due, and a table below it listing each paycheck's date, BUDGETED and ACTUAL amounts. The table starts with three rows; Show more adds more.

Budgeted is the plan as it was built. Actual is the plan you're tracking on Home, with your edits in it. Until you change anything the two lines sit on top of each other; change a paycheck amount because a check came in different, and Actual moves while Budgeted stays where the plan put it.

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

• ›Checks consistently below what you built with — your plan is built on income you don't receive. Every projected date in it is optimistic. Rebuild with the real figure.
• ›Checks consistently above — 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.

To compare against what you entered when you built the budget, open it in the Archive — the Income tile under What went in shows the original figures.

The other breakdowns

Savings works the same way as Income: the monthly figures, a budgeted-vs-actual chart and a paycheck table.

Housing and Expenses add a row of filter chips, so you can look at All or one item. Their figures, chart and table are by month.

Debt adds a filter chip for each debt. Pick one and a card shows its remaining balance, the starting balance, and the share paid off — based on the payments you've marked paid. Below that are the monthly figures, a Paid off in figure, a Balance over time chart, and a Payment & balance by month table.

Debts Do Not Complete

If your debts aren't projected to clear within the plan, Paid off in says Debts Do Not Complete instead of a length of time.

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.

Using this section

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

The order of questions:

1. ›Are your paychecks still what you built the budget with? If not, that's your rebuild trigger.
2. ›Is the high-to-low 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.

On the Free plan

The figures and the paycheck tables in each breakdown are open to everyone. The charts, the debt balance card, and the debt table are blurred behind Upgrade Your Plan. See What's Included with Thrive.