Enter your income, then assign it until there is nothing left to assign. That's the whole method — and the number that matters is the one at the top of the results.
Take-home pay, plus anything else you can count on this month.
Left to assign
Enter your income
Getting to zero once is the easy part. It's week three — when a bill lands early and the numbers drift — that decides whether a budget survives. Alfie is built on exactly this method, and carries your assignments from one month into the next.
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Most budgets fail quietly. Not with a dramatic overspend, but with money that was never assigned to anything in particular drifting away over three weeks. Zero-based budgeting closes that gap by refusing to leave any dollar unnamed.
Reaching zero does not mean spending everything. Money assigned to savings, to investing, or to paying down debt has a job. The point is thatnothing is sitting unallocated, which is the state in which money disappears.
A zero-based budget is straightforward to build once. It is keeping it accurate through a month of real life — a bill landing early, a category running over, a refund arriving — that decides whether it survives. That requires moving money between categories as things change, rather than abandoning the plan the first time it stops matching reality.
