Weekly budgets based on (a variable) monthly budget
"I think the real problem here is dealing with the variable income. The envelope solution suggests the problem is that your brother doesn't have the discipline to avoid spending all his money immediately, but maybe that's not it. Maybe he could regulate his expenses just fine, but with such a variable income, he can't settle into a ""normal"" spending pattern. Without any savings, any budget would have to be based on the worst possible income for a month. This isn't a great: it means a poor quality of life. And what do you do with the extra money in the better-than-worst months? While it's easy to say ""plan for the worst, then when it's better, save that money"", that's just not going to happen. No one will want to live at their worst-case standard of living all the time. Someone would have to be a real miser to have the discipline to not use that extra money for something. You can say to save it for emergencies or unexpected events, but there's always a way to rationalize spending it. ""I'm a musician, so this new guitar is a necessary business expense!"" Or maybe the car is broken. Surely this is a necessary expense! But, do you buy a $1000 car or a $20000 car? There's always a way to rationalize what's necessary, but it doesn't change financial reality. With a highly variable income, he will need some cash saved up to fill in the bad months, which is replenished in the good months. For success, you need a reasonable plan for making that happen: one that includes provisions for spending it other than ""please try not to spend it"". I would suggest tracking income accurately for several months. Then you will have a real number (not a guess) of what an average month is. Then, you can budget on that. You will also have real numbers that allow you to calculate how long the bad stretches are, and thus determine how much cash reserve is necessary to make the odds of going broke in a bad period unlikely. Having that, you can make a budget based on average income, which should have some allowance for enjoying life. Of course initially the cash reserve doesn't exist, but knowing exactly what will happen when it does provides a good motivation for building the reserve rather than spending it today. Knowing that the budget includes rules for spending the reserves reduces the incentive to cheat. Of course, the eventual budget should also include provisions for long term savings for retirement, medical expenses, car maintenance, etc. You can do the envelope thing if that's helpful. The point here is to solve the problem of the variable income, so you can have an average income that doesn't result in a budget that delivers a soul crushing decrease in quality of living." If you know, approximately, the minimum he would get in a month, his budget should be planned based on this amount. In months where he gets more than this, the excess should be put aside. In really bad months where the income drops below the expected minimum, he can use the money put aside. After a year of putting money aside, he can plan to use and budget this for any other expenses. Try reading about budgeting.  Make a list of all income coming in and all expenses going out. Eliminate any unnecessary expenses and try to increase income, which could include a part-time second job.  Try to always put a portion of the income away as savings - try 10%, but if this is too hard to start with try saving at least 5% of the income. Developing self-discipline in his spending habits is a prerequisite for dealing with a (sometimes low) variable income.  While it might feel like a roller coaster ride going from boom to bust, develop steady frugal spending habits will ease a lot of that pressure.
"now that's just crazy talk. Politicians on capitol hill wouldn't dream about talking about any sort of *tangible* aspects of economy. Focusing on raw goods/commodities production through a campaign? Shit... that's PR suicide in every urban area (which immediately matters based on population numbers). Much easier to either reference your local military benefactors as ""job creators"" and espouse them if you have them. If you don't, then speak to an idealistic sentiment which entertains any willingness to jump to total warfare at a moment's notice. Once you fall out of favor with the military elite in the rest of the country, you are seen to be managing your community ""dangerously irresponsibly"" and ""frighteningly ignorant of the dangers in the world."" And, obviously, the biggest money is in technology people simply *can't* talk about publicly. It's unwise to ignore those efforts/finances, however.  The only flexible mainstay in the budget is Defense. Healthcare spending is, well, the term *gluttonous* comes to mind. Education? Lol. Right. Just put the kids in debt and go fuck yourself / have a nice day. Oh and don't forget your 306^^th monthly installation of your house payment. The other mainstay of the budget? Pensions. Good luck reforming that with the unions in any direction but toward the sky. Welfare? Welfare reforms generally play out really well in the media, don't they? Can you say, ""fuck you, poor people,"" any louder?   Defense. Defense is the only malleable entity in the budget but we all know it's easier for the commercial politicians® to purchase media campaigns and drum up not only a sentiment of war, but conditions for their own interests to secure new business in other countries. Teaching Americans to fear things about the world can be done and it costs about $150m per year in a single direction if you know someone who will take your money (gurgling network executives shitting their pants with good, old-fashioned Incontinence). If anyone was ever serious about turning greater profits from commercialization of military research, they'd improve the goddamned state of education in the country. [What a fucking farce.](http://i.imgur.com/22mZxCr.png)  There should be a plan in place to study the rate of the nominal value of domestic technological innovation, as best as can be perceived, and the spending elsewhere in the budget needs to be correlated to that figure directly. We cannot continue assuming innovation is constant in the United States while restricting education funding so heavily. It is such an embarrassment. And we're imperiling ourselves by finding supplementary, service-based revenue solutions by beating the same dead horse with financial policy. The guys at the Fed are tired. Believe me." "littleadv's first comment - check the note - is really the answer. But your issue is twofold -  Every mortgage I've had (over 10 in my lifetime) allows early principal payments. The extra principal can only be applied at the same time as the regular payment. Think of it this way - only at that moment is there no interest owed. If a week later you try to pay toward only principal, the system will not handle it. Pretty simple - extra principal with the payment due. In fact, any mortgage I've had that offered a monthly bill or coupon book will have that very line ""extra principal."" By coincidence, I just did this for a mortgage on my rental. I make these payments through my bank's billpay service. I noted the extra principal in the 'notes' section of the virtual check. But again, the note will explicitly state if there's an issue with prepayments of principal. The larger issue is that your friend wishes to treat the mortgage like a bi-weekly. The bank expects the full amount as a payment and likely, has no obligation to accept anything less than the full amount. Given my first comment above here is the plan for your friend to do 99% of what she wishes: Tell her, there's nothing magic about bi-weekly, it's a budget-clever way to send the money, but over a year, it's simply paying 108% of the normal payment. If she wants to burn the mortgage faster, tell her to add what she wishes every month, even $10, it all adds up.  Final note - There are two schools of thought to either extreme, (a) pay the mortgage off as fast as you can, no debt is the goal and (b) the mortgage is the lowest rate you'll ever have on borrowed money, pay it as slow as you can, and invest any extra money. I accept and respect both views. For your friend, and first group, I'm compelled to add - Be sure to deposit to your retirement account's matched funds to gain the entire match. $1 can pay toward your 6% mortgage or be doubled on deposit to $2 in your 401(k), if available. And pay off all high interest debt first. This should stand to reason, but I've seen people keep their 18% card debt while prepaying their mortgage." "The key to this is budgeting. Without a budget, you don't know what you are spending your money on.  Let's say you would like to go to a movie with a friend.  Can you afford it?  Without a budget, it is difficult to answer this question.  Yes, you have enough money in your wallet, but if you don't go to the movies, you could be saving that money for a house.  ""But,"" you might say to yourself, ""surely one movie with my friend won't prevent me from saving my $10k for my house.""  And you might be right, but when you add up all the movies, coffees, and other discretionary spending up, it very well could.   At this point, you might be discouraged.  ""Do I seriously need to give up every single extravagance to make this work?  I don't have that kind of willpower!""  Luckily, here is where budgeting comes to the rescue. Budgeting is simply a plan for your money.  You have some monthly expenses that are more or less fixed: your rent, your utility bills, etc.  You have other expenses that are not exactly fixed, but are still necessary: groceries, fuel for your car, etc.  You also have longer-range expenses, such as insurance premiums that you only pay once or twice a year, but need to be accounted for.  List all of these expenses, and figure out how much that comes to each month.  What you have left over is available to you for other things. Next, you need to figure out how fast you want to save for this house, and balance that with the other things you might want to spend money on, such as entertainment.  If you start from $0 and want to save $10k, you could do it by saving $100 a month: in a little over 8 years, you'll have your $10k.  If you can increase this to $300 a month, you'll be there in less than 3 years. Now that you have a plan and everything is accounted for, very little willpower is needed.  You don't need to feel guilty every time you buy coffee; if the money is there in your coffee/snacks budget, go for it.  If you've got extra money for the month in your entertainment budget, take a date to the movies.  Your budget allows you to spend on those things, because you have a plan in place, and are not in danger of spending your rent money or your home savings. This can all be done on paper, in Excel, or even by placing cash in different envelopes.  However, it is easier to use budgeting software, such as YNAB, Mvelopes, or EveryDollar." "It totally depends on when your expenses hit and whether you might have a larger stock than necessary. If you run your projections against the monthly save and the intervals of when you'll need the money, you might be able to extract some stock from the account.  I recommend making this a bit simpler. I operate this with an ""annuals"" account which is a complete aggregate of expenses that I know I have several times per year (or once every two years), but are not monthly or part of a weekly non-fixed expense budget cap. Instead of tracking each expense individually and saving for it, create a spreadsheet that lists out all of these expenses, sum them, and then divide by 12. When I first opened this account, I added a one-time deposit to ""catchup"" to make sure I would never need to pull money from another source for these expenses. As new expenses come into existence that I should plan for annually, I simply add them to this list and adjust the monthly auto-deposit to the account. This also adjusts my single number weekly budget.  To make it easy, whenever I see an expense on my annuals list on my amex or debit, I simply initiate a withdrawal from the annuals savings and it will balance out my weekly or monthly budget expenses.  The goal of my annuals account is to simply avoid anti-windfalls that are known quantities (insurance, annual eye exam, sprinkler flush, amazon prime, etc) that would throw a wrench in weekly/monthly budget and expense planning. The more variables you can remove from your weekly/monthly, the more regular it becomes and the more likely you will be able to stick to a budget." "I'm not convinced this is completely possible without additional data.  I'm categorizing my purchases now, and I keep running into things like ""was this hardware store purchase for home repair, hobby tools and supplies, cookware, ..."" Ditto for department stores, ditto for cash purchases which appear only as an ATM withdrawal. Sometimes I remember, sometimes I guess, sometimes I just give up. In the end, this budget tracking isn't critical for me so that's good enough. If you really want accuracy, though, I think you are stuck with keeping all your receipts, of taking notes, so you can resolve these gaps." "Budgeting is a tool for planning, not for execution. It sounds like you don't have a problem BUDGETING (planning what to spend on what things) but rather with the execution of your plan. That is - living frugally. This is primarily an issue of self control and personal psychology - not an issue with the mechanics of budgeting and finance, which explains why the most popular personal finance ""gurus"" (Dave Ramsey, Suze Ormond) deal as much with your relationship to money and spending as they do with financial knowledge. There is no easy answer here, but you can learn to spend less. One helpful thought is to realize that whatever your current income is, someone in your community is currently making less than that and surviving. What would you do differently if your real, actual income was $100 or $200 less than it is currently. If your food budget is a concern, learn to cook cheaply. (Often, this is more healthy.) You mentioned schooling, so I assume you are on or near a college campus. Many colleges have all sorts of free-food opportunities. (I used to eat free vegetarian meals weekly at a Hare Krsna temple. Price of admission: listening to the monk read from the Bhagavad Gita.) Fast food is, of course, a complete no-no on low-budget living. It probably goes without saying, but just in case you haven't: cancel cable, get a cheap phone plan (Ting is excellent if available in your area), and otherwise see how you can squeeze a few dollars out of your bills. On the subject of frugality, I have found no book more enlightening than: Money Secrets of the Amish: Finding True Abundance in Simplicity, Sharing, and Saving" "For the most part, saving money usually depends upon having a budget and being able to stick to it. The toughest part of budgeting is usually setting it up (how much do I need for X) and sticking to it each month. In regards to sticking to it, there is software that you can use that helps figure out how much you are spending and how much you have left in a given category and they all pretty much do the same thing: track your spending and how much you have left in the category. If you are good with spreadsheets you might prefer that route (cost: free) but software that you can buy usually has value in that it can also generate reports that help you spot trends that you might not see in the spreadsheet. Sticking to a budget can be tough and a lot of what people have said already is good advice, but one thing that helps for me is having ""play money"" that can be used for whatever I want. In general this should be a fairly nominal amount ($20 or $40 a week) but it is enough that if you see a new book you want or what to go out for lunch one day you can do it without impacting the overall budget in some way. Likewise, having bigger savings goals can also be useful in that if times get tough it is easier to stop putting $100 a month to the side for a vacation than it is to cut back your grocery budget." "For a personal finance forum, this is too complicated for sustained use and you should find a simpler solution. For a mathematical exercise, you are missing information required to do the split fairly.  You have to know who overlaps and when to know how to do the splits.   For an extreme example, take your dates given: Considering 100 days of calculation period,  If Roommate D was the only person present for the last 10 days, they should pay 100% of the grocery bill as they are the only one eating.   From your initial data set, you can't know who should be splitting the tab for any given day. To do this mathematically, you'd need:  But don't forget ""In Theory, Theory works.  In Practice, Practice works."" Good theory would say make a large, complicated spreadsheet as described above.   Good practice would be to split up the costs in a much, much simpler way."