September 2020

Getting started budgeting with a weekly or biweekly income can be tough - your income never quite lines up with your big bills like rent, car payments, etc. Go Budget tries to help with this in a few different ways.

Income Cadence

First and foremost, Go Budget lets you configure income with any frequency - weekly, biweekly, semi-monthly (1st and 15th), semi-monthly (15th and end of month), monthly, and irregular. You can also edit the amount of each income payment Go Budget automatically logs, and you can add one-time payments as needed.

Budget Period

Go Budget also lets you set your Budget Period (the frequency or basis of your budget - e.g. monthly, semi-monthly, weekly, biweekly) independently from the frequency you receive your income. This means that no matter how often you get your income, you can still see your budget overview for a set period of time (usually monthly), and always know whether you’ll need to save money from one period to cover a shortage in the next.

So what’s the best strategy for handling income that doesn’t match up with your bills?

Monthly Budgeting

We believe that the ideal way to budget is on a monthly basis, regardless of how often you get paid, since this is how often most major bills are due. Within Go Budget, once you set up your income and bills, you can see in the Overview tab whether your income for any given month will cover your bills and other spending.

Go Budget will show which days you’re scheduled to get income (based on what you set up) and how much you’ll get overall for the month.

If your income is inconsistent, it can take some time to build up enough of a buffer of cash in savings to successfully budget monthly, but once you do things are much simpler.

Non-Monthly Budgeting

Things gets a bit trickier if you want (or need) to budget on a shorter basis. For example, if you get paid semi-monthly (twice a month) and want to budget semi-monthly, then your rent or mortgage will only ever fall every other budgeting period. If you budget this way, be careful to always check the next budget period to see if you need to save some money from the current period to cover bills then. (You can do this in Go Budget just by tabbing to the next period in the Overview and Bill pages).

Nevertheless, Go Budget supports these situations too, allowing you to budget on a weekly, biweekly, or semi-monthly basis in addition to the standard monthly budget. In these cases, Go Budget will always show you what bills you have due this week/two-weeks/etc. AND show you what bills are due in the upcoming period (in the Bills tab).

Within the Overview tab, Go Budget will show you whether the income you’re going to receive for each period will cover the expenses you’ll have. Again, sometimes you might be short and you’ll have to save some from a previous period, so be careful not to focus only on the current period.