Budgeting
Most budgeting apps hand you a blank grid and a moral obligation. feels.money asks two questions — what comes in, what roughly goes out — and computes a complete monthly plan from them: twelve category limits, a savings target, and guardrails that stop the plan quietly eating your savings.
This page explains exactly what it computes and how, the rules it refuses to break, and the one number that measures whether the plan survived the month.
the point of the thing
The reason budgets are worth the trouble is not discipline. It is that deciding once — at the start of the month, calmly, with the numbers in front of you — is dramatically easier than deciding forty separate times in the checkout queue with a coffee going cold in your hand. A budget converts a long series of small, tiring, guilt-adjacent decisions into a single planning decision you can revisit whenever you like.
That only works if the plan is plausible. A limit set at half of what you have spent on groceries every month for a year is not ambitious, it is fiction, and the first week that it breaks is the week you stop opening the app. So the goal here is not to produce the most virtuous budget imaginable. It is to produce a defensible one: limits derived from real arithmetic on your real income, with enough room left over that saving happens automatically rather than heroically.
Everything below follows from that. The proportions come from a framework with a long track record. The guardrails exist to stop the plan from swallowing your savings. And the score that measures adherence is proportional, not binary — going $40 over on groceries is a rounding error, not a failure.
the framework
Fifty percent of income to needs, thirty to wants, the rest left for saving and paying down debt — turned into specific dollar limits rather than a slogan.
feels.money splits the classic framework across twelve categories. Five are treated as needs — Housing, Utilities, Groceries, Transport, and Health & Fitness. Seven are treated as wants — Food & Drink, Shopping, Entertainment, Travel, Subscriptions, Fees, and Other. Income and Transfer are deliberately left out of the budget entirely: money moving between your own accounts is not spending, and treating it as spending is how a budget ends up telling you that you spent your whole salary twice.
The shares are specific rather than hand-waved. Housing takes the largest single slice at 28% of income, groceries 9%, food and drink 8%, shopping 7%, transport 6%, utilities and entertainment and travel 4% each, health and subscriptions and the catch-all 3% each, and fees 1%. Add the needs and you get exactly half your income; add the wants and you get exactly thirty percent. Limits are rounded to whole dollars, because budgeting to the cent is a way of looking busy.
A $5,200/month plan, as the engine computes it
Monthly income $5,200
Housing · Utilities · Groceries · Transport · Health & Fitness
Food & Drink · Shopping · Entertainment · Travel · Subscriptions · Fees · Other
Never squeezed below 10% of income — more when your savings target is higher
suggestBudget() function the app calls when it generates your plan. The percentages and guardrails are real; the household is invented.Three guardrails sit on top of those shares, and they are hard guarantees of the calculation rather than suggestions:
The twelve limits, and what each one costs you
| Category | Limit | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Housing | $1,456 | 28% |
| Utilities | $208 | 4% |
| Groceries | $468 | 9% |
| Transport | $312 | 6% |
| Health & Fitness | $156 | 3% |
| Food & Drink | $416 | 8% |
| Shopping | $364 | 7% |
| Entertainment | $208 | 4% |
| Travel | $208 | 4% |
| Subscriptions | $156 | 3% |
| Fees | $52 | 1% |
| Other | $156 | 3% |
| Left for saving and debt | $1,040 | 20% |
during the month
A plan is only useful if you can see where you stand without doing arithmetic. Every transaction that syncs is placed into one of the fourteen platform categories automatically, and the spending view rolls those up into the twelve budgeted ones. Each category shows what you have spent, how it compares with last month, and — when you tap it — the individual transactions behind the number. Where a limit exists for that month, it is drawn as a marker on the bar, with the amount you are over or under stated in words underneath.
Transfers and anything you have marked as excluded never count. Pending transactions are visible but flagged. If a charge landed in the wrong bucket, you can recategorize it in one tap and the whole month recalculates; your override is stored alongside the provider's original value, so the next sync cannot silently undo your correction. The mechanics of that are on the expense tracker page.
When a category runs past 110% of its limit, a single notification is raised naming the category, the amount, and the percentage — once per category per month, not a running commentary. Alongside that, a set of deterministic detectors watches for patterns worth naming: lifestyle inflation as your baseline creeps upward, clusters of impulse purchases, a dining trend moving in one direction, your largest purchases, and how this month compares with the last. These are descriptions, not verdicts.
the score
One number for how closely the month tracked the plan — and a deliberate decision not to let it dominate.
Adherence is calculated in the least dramatic way possible. Add up the amount by which every category exceeded its limit. Divide that total by the sum of all your limits. Subtract from one. Categories you came in under do not earn credit that offsets an overspend elsewhere, because a $200 underspend on travel does not undo a $200 overspend on rent — and categories with no limit set are skipped entirely.
The result is a figure between 0 and 1 that behaves the way you would expect: small overruns move it slightly, and blowing through several categories moves it a lot. With no limits at all the calculation has nothing to violate and returns 1 — and in your health score, a month with no budget on file is scored at a neutral 0.6 instead, so you are neither rewarded nor punished for not having started.
One month, scored against those limits
budgetAdherence() function the health score uses. The weight shown is the real weight adherence carries in the 0–100 score.That figure then becomes one of eight weighted subscores in your financial health score, and it is deliberately not the biggest one. Savings rate carries 20%, cash flow, debt load and emergency fund carry 15% each, investing and income stability 10% each, and adherence and spending habits 7.5% each. The reasoning is simple: staying inside self-imposed limits is a useful habit, but having six months of expenses in the bank matters more, and we would rather the score reflect that than flatter your discipline.
Every subscore comes with a plain-English explanation of what produced it — the actual percentages, the actual dollar amounts — so the number is never a black box you have to trust. The coach reads the same subscores, which is why its answers and your dashboard never disagree.
how it behaves
Two answers — income and typical spending — produce twelve limits, a savings target and a set of guardrails. The same function runs every time, so the plan is reproducible rather than a matter of which day you filled the form in.
Category totals, month-over-month deltas and the position of each limit are recomputed on every sync, so where you stand is a page you look at rather than a spreadsheet you maintain.
Any transaction can be recategorized, excluded from analytics, flagged as an impulse or annotated. Those choices are stored separately from the provider's data, so a later sync never overwrites them.
The budget is a plan, not an instruction. Bank connections are read-only, so nothing here can transfer, pay, or freeze anything on your behalf.
One more boundary worth stating plainly: this is a planning and education tool, not financial advice. feels.money is not a registered investment adviser, broker, or fiduciary. It computes your numbers, explains the arithmetic, and lays out options — the decisions, and the consequences, remain yours. For anything with real stakes, talk to a professional who knows your whole situation.
questions
Answer the onboarding questions and the twelve limits are computed on the spot. Connect an account and the spending side fills in behind them. Free forever, no card, and you can delete everything in two clicks if it isn't for you.