Cashfox
|Guide
Open App
All Guides

Budget & Income

Your financial foundation. Understanding where your money comes from and how it's divided.

What the Budget Section Does

This is where everything starts. The Budget section answers one question: "How much money do I actually have to work with this month?" Get this right, and every other number in Cashfox makes sense.
Your budget sets your daily spending pace, drives how fast your goals move, and feeds every metric on your dashboard. Think of it as the single source of truth that the whole app reads from. Change it, and everything adjusts automatically.

Income Sources

Income Sources List

Every stream of money coming in. Salary, freelance work, side hustles, bonuses. Each source has an amount and a frequency (weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, annually), and Cashfox converts everything to a monthly figure for you.

A freelancer earning $2,000 biweekly actually makes $4,333 a month, not $4,000. Getting this right means your budget reflects what you actually earn, so your goals and safe-to-spend aren't built on a made-up number.

Salary: $3,200 biweekly → $6,933/month | Freelance: $800 monthly | Total: $7,733/month

Tip

If your income is irregular (freelance, commission, seasonal work), use a 3-month average as your baseline. Add up the last three months, divide by three, and use that as your monthly figure. It smooths out feast-and-famine cycles so your budget stays grounded even in a slow month.

Tax Set-Aside

If you're self-employed, you can tell Cashfox what percentage to hold back for taxes before calculating your usable income. Set it once and forget it.

Spending your gross freelance income is one of the fastest ways to get blindsided at tax time. Setting aside your tax percentage first means your budget only shows money you can genuinely spend or save.

One-Time Income

Bonuses, selling stuff online, a cash gift. These have a start date and an optional end date so they don't permanently inflate your budget baseline.

A $2,000 bonus shouldn't trick you into thinking you have $2,000 more to spend every month going forward. Flagging it as one-time keeps your baseline honest.

The Budget Split (Needs / Wants / Savings)

Once Cashfox knows your income, you decide how to split it into three buckets. The default is 50/30/20 (50% needs, 30% wants, 20% savings), but you can slide those percentages wherever you need. This split is the backbone of your whole budget.

Example

On $5,000/month income with 50/30/20: Needs = $2,500 (rent, groceries, insurance) | Wants = $1,500 (dining out, entertainment, shopping) | Savings = $1,000 (emergency fund, vacation, retirement)

Tip

Most financial planners suggest starting with 50/30/20 and then adjusting after a month of real data. If your rent alone eats 40% of your income, that's completely fine. Just shift the percentages to match your reality instead of pretending a textbook split applies to your life. The goal is accuracy, not perfection.

Allocation Bar

Allocation Bar

A horizontal stacked bar that shows your needs/wants/savings split at a glance. Each segment shows the percentage and the dollar amount side by side.

Seeing 50/30/20 as actual dollars makes the tradeoffs real. If needs are eating 60%, you can immediately see how that squeezes your wants and savings, and understand why your goals might be moving slower than you'd like.

Budget vs Actual Bars

Budget vs Actual Progress Bars

Three horizontal progress bars, one per bucket (Needs, Wants, Savings), showing how much of each allocation you've spent so far this month. The fill animates in when the section loads so the gap between planned and actual spending registers immediately.

The percentage split tells you where your money should go. These bars tell you where it actually went. Seeing both in the same view makes it obvious whether you're tracking to your plan or drifting away from it.

Needs: $1,840 of $2,500 spent (74%). Wants: $1,420 of $1,500 spent (95%). Savings: $1,000 of $1,000 on track.

Tip

When a bar turns amber, you're approaching or above your allocation for that bucket. It's not a verdict, just a heads-up. Amber on Wants means your spending is ahead of what you planned this month. Amber on Needs might mean a fixed cost has gone up and the split needs a nudge.

Budget Summary Card

Total Monthly Income

Your normalized monthly income from all sources, after tax set-aside deductions. This is the number your entire budget is built on.

This single number drives everything downstream. How much you can spend each day, how fast your goals grow, how your savings compound over time. Every other metric in the app traces back to this one.

Monthly Pace Chart

Pace chart

A line chart tracking your cumulative Wants spending through the month against a dashed 'trail line'. The trail line shows where you'd be if you spread your wants budget evenly across every day. Stay below the dashed line and you're on track.

Without this, it's easy to burn through your wants budget in two weeks and have nothing left. The pace chart makes your spending rhythm visible early enough to actually do something about it.

Day 15 of 30: trail line sits at $750 (half your $1,500 wants budget). Your actual line is at $600. You're $150 ahead of pace. You've got breathing room.

Tip

Professional budgeters call this "spending velocity." The trick isn't spending zero early in the month. It's spending evenly. Front-loading your wants budget in week one feels fine in the moment, but you'll be strapped by week four. Steady wins.

Tip

The pace chart only tracks Wants, not Needs or Savings. Needs are mostly fixed (rent, utilities), and Savings are goal-directed. Wants are where your daily choices actually move the needle.

Budget Bucket Cards

Needs bucket

Shows how much you've spent on essentials (rent, groceries, insurance, utilities) versus your needs allocation for the month. Tap to expand and see the individual expenses underneath.

If your needs consistently run over their allocation, your wants and savings get squeezed by default. Seeing this clearly helps you decide whether to adjust the split or find ways to bring fixed costs down.

Wants bucket

Shows how much you've spent on lifestyle purchases (dining out, entertainment, shopping) versus your wants budget. This is the bucket where your day-to-day choices have the biggest impact.

Wants spending is the lever you control most directly. Every dollar that stays here rather than getting spent is a dollar that could move toward your goals or build a larger safety buffer.

Category Budgets & Custom Categories

Each bucket can be broken down further into categories. Needs might have Groceries, Rent, Insurance, and Transport. Wants might have Dining, Entertainment, and Clothing. You decide the structure, and you decide how much of each bucket's allocation goes to each category.

Category Allocation Editor

A slide-out sheet that opens when you tap "Adjust Allocations" on any bucket card. Inside, each category has its own dollar input. Set $500 for Groceries, $200 for Transport, $150 for Insurance, and the editor shows you how much of the bucket you've assigned versus how much is left.

A bucket total tells you the ceiling. Category allocations tell you the plan. "I have $2,500 for Needs" is vague. "$1,400 is rent, $500 is groceries, $300 is transport, $300 is utilities" is something you can actually act on.

Needs bucket: $2,500 total. Groceries: $500. Rent: $1,400. Transport: $200. Utilities: $250. Remaining unallocated: $150.

Tip

The editor shows an amber warning at the bottom if your category totals exceed the bucket allocation. It won't block you from saving, but it flags the overage clearly so you can decide whether to trim a category or bump up the bucket percentage. Over-allocation means your plan currently exceeds what you've budgeted.

Over-Allocation Indicator

When category allocations add up to more than the bucket total, the bucket card gets an amber border and the "Adjust Allocations" button label dynamically shows the overage amount (e.g., "Adjust Allocations — $50 over"). Tap it to open the editor and rebalance.

This keeps your plan internally consistent. Assigning $2,600 worth of categories to a $2,500 bucket means $100 has to come from somewhere. The amber signal surfaces that math problem before it becomes a surprise at the end of the month.

Custom Categories

Every bucket comes with sensible defaults, but you can add, rename, delete, or reorder categories to match how you actually think about your money. Add a "Pet Care" category to Needs. Rename "Entertainment" to "Fun Money." Delete categories you never use.

Generic category names make budgeting feel like someone else's system. When the categories match your actual spending habits, the budget feels personal rather than prescriptive. You're more likely to use it consistently.

Tip

Reordering categories in the manager changes the order they appear in the allocation editor and throughout the app. Put the categories you look at most at the top so your highest-priority buckets are always visible first.

Savings Goal Cards

Savings goal cards

Instead of vague savings categories, this section shows your actual goals (Emergency Fund, Vacation, whatever you named them) and how much of your savings budget is committed to each one. If your total contributions exceed your savings allocation, a heads-up appears.

Your savings aren't abstract. They're attached to real goals with real timelines. Seeing each goal's monthly contribution here makes it obvious whether your current split is enough to get there on time.

Tip

Here's a principle that changes everything: treat savings like a bill. Don't wait until the end of the month to save whatever's left over. Move your savings contribution on payday, before you spend anything else. What you don't see, you don't spend.

How Budget Connects to Everything Else

When you update your income or budget split:

Income changes
Monthly budget recalculates
Savings allocation updates
Goal projections shift
Dashboard metrics change
Your budget is the foundation. Change it and everything downstream moves. Increase your income and keep the same split, your savings grow and goals get closer. Shift more to wants, goals get further away. It's all connected.

Budget to expenses

Your needs/wants/savings split determines which bucket each expense counts against. When you log an expense, it flows into the right bucket and updates your pace chart automatically.

Budget to goals

Your savings allocation directly funds your goal contributions. A higher savings percentage means more money flowing toward your goals each month, which pulls projected completion dates forward.

Budget to dashboard

Safe-to-spend, savings rate, and expense velocity all come from your budget numbers. That hero metric you see every time you open the app? It's calculated from what you set right here.

Real-World Example

Getting a raise

You update your salary from $5,000 to $5,500/month. With a 50/30/20 split: Needs goes from $2,500 to $2,750. Wants goes from $1,500 to $1,650. Savings goes from $1,000 to $1,100. That extra $100/month in savings means your Emergency Fund goal, which was 12 months away, is now 11 months away. The dashboard shows the shift immediately.