Help & Guide
Create savings and giving goals, build an emergency fund, split one balance across several goals, and save automatically on payday.
Open the Savings (or Giving) studio and add a goal. Only a name is required, but add a target amount and a target date to unlock progress tracking and pace.
Giving works exactly like Savings — the same tool with a different label and color — and defaults new goals to year-end so giving is framed annually.
An opt-in baseline everyone should have, even without a specific goal in mind. It's sized to your essential bills — housing, utilities, minimum debt payments, and other required costs (subscriptions and your savings/giving don't count). Tap “Start emergency fund” on the suggestion card and we set the target and switch on payday contributions for you.
While you still have debt it aims for 1 month of essentials — a starter buffer that funds AHEAD of any extra debt payments, so one surprise doesn't land back on a credit card and undo your progress. Once it's full it steps aside, and that money flows to your debt again.
When you become debt-free, we offer a one-tap “Grow to 3 months” to build the full 3-month safety net. You can dismiss the suggestion anytime, or start it later from the Savings studio.
When your last income period of the month has money left over after everything's covered, we offer to sweep that leftover into your Emergency Fund — one tap on the clock posts it, tap again to pull it back, just like marking any other line paid.
It's an easy way to turn a good month's surplus into a bigger safety net instead of letting it quietly get spent. Only the final paycheck offers it, so earlier surplus can still flow to that month's later bills first.
On the Emergency Fund card tap “Record a withdrawal” and enter how much you took out. Its saved amount drops to match, so it stops showing fully funded when it isn't — and if it had already finished filling, contributions restart so it rebuilds itself.
That's the whole point of the fund: spend it in a real emergency, and the app quietly goes back to refilling it. This works because a payday-contribution goal's progress is normally count-only-up; recording a withdrawal is what lets it come back down to reality.
It splits your one savings balance across your goals so you can see where every dollar is pointed — the Emergency Fund plus each goal's share, with anything not yet assigned shown as “Unallocated.” The slices always add up to your total saved.
Your single balance is split across all your goals so no dollar is counted twice, filling the goal with the nearest deadline first, then the next.
So $1,400 across a $1,000 goal due in March and a $2,000 goal due in June shows March at $1,000 (full) and June at $400. Each goal shows its share of the one pot, not the whole pot.
Yes — type a figure into a goal's “Set aside” box (“Given” in the Giving Studio, since that money has already gone out) to pin its share (capped at its target). The rest of your balance then auto-splits across the other goals, still earliest-due-first.
Tap “Auto-split” to remove the pin. If your pins add up to more than your balance, it's flagged “Over-allocated.”
An opt-in that drops a small savings line onto every payday so the goal fills itself as you mark those lines paid — a debt paid off in reverse. Set a target and date, then turn on payday contributions (you need at least one recurring income).
The per-payday amount is fixed (what's left ÷ paydays remaining), so skipping or paying one short just moves the funded-by date later — it never balloons the next contribution.
In real life you don't make a separate transfer for every goal — on payday you move one amount to savings. So a payday's savings contributions are summed into a single “Savings” rollup line (and giving into a “Giving” line), showing the one number to transfer. Tap the line to see the individual goals behind it and mark them paid as usual.
Because savings and giving now have their own lines, the “Bills” line shows only money owed to others — your transfers to yourself are no longer hidden inside it. Your “Free” total is unchanged; the money just sits on the line that describes it.
Removing one of a goal's payday lines (from the full editor or the Month-by-month page) also removes it from the Studio — the app tells you so before it does. If the goal is funded from more than one paycheck, it keeps saving from the others; only its finish date slips a little.
If it was the goal's only contribution line, removing it stops the automatic saving, and the app asks whether to keep the goal (to track by hand) or remove it from the Studio too. To pause contributions without deleting anything, turn off payday contributions in the Studio instead.
For payday contributions, just mark the savings (or giving) line paid on the paycheck card and the goal ticks up automatically. Otherwise edit the balance — “Given” in the Giving Studio — or pin a per-goal amount.
When the money actually leaves for its purpose, “Mark as paid” (or “Mark as given”) closes the goal out and deducts its share from your balance. You can undo that anytime.
A “lumpy” bill is one that recurs less often than monthly — yearly car insurance, a quarterly water bill, a semiannual HOA fee. Because the whole cost lands on one paycheck, it spikes that check and can make the whole month look “Short.”
A sinking fund fixes that by saving for the bill a little at a time: it sets aside a small amount on every payday so that, by the time the big bill is due, the money is already there. One scary $2,400 hit becomes a calm ~$200 a paycheck, and the month it lands no longer spikes. It's the same idea as paying off a debt, run in reverse.
No — the bill doesn't move, and its category never changes. Smoothing re-labels nothing: a utilities bill stays a utilities bill, right where it was.
All it adds are separate little “set aside” lines on your paydays that build the cash up before the bill is due. Picture a savings envelope sitting next to the bill — not the bill itself being relabeled. That's why what you set aside shows up under “Savings” while the bill keeps its normal spot, and why turning smoothing off simply removes those payday lines and leaves the bill untouched.
The Savings studio scans your bills and, for each lumpy one that's big enough to actually hurt a paycheck, shows a “Smooth this bill” card. Small odds and ends (a $40 password manager, a $95 email plan) aren't suggested — smoothing those would just add clutter. Monthly bills are already even, so they're never suggested either.
Nothing is created until you tap “Smooth this bill.” When you do, we make the fund, size it to the bill's amount and next due date, and switch on payday contributions for you automatically.
Tapped “Not now” and changed your mind? The dismissal is saved so it won't keep nagging — use “Show hidden smoothing suggestions” at the bottom of the same card to bring it back.
Say your car insurance is $2,400, due every July, and you tap “Smooth this bill” in January.
January–June: each payday shows a small savings line (about $200 with two checks a month), rolled into your one “Savings” transfer. As you mark those paid, the fund fills. This money is treated as committed — a paycheck's “Left over” is what's spare after your goals, so the box that sends money at debt never offers it. That bill is coming.
July: the $2,400 bill arrives, but the fund already holds $2,400. It nets out of that paycheck's “Bills” and shows as a “From fund” credit, so July stays calm instead of “Short.” When you mark that bill Posted, the fund draws itself down and starts filling for next July — you don't have to come back here and do it.
A sinking fund is just a savings goal, so it sits in your Goals list with a blue “Smoothing” badge and a progress bar toward the next bill. Its target and date are locked to the bill so they can't drift out of sync — that's why it has no edit pencil or “Set aside” box like your other goals.
Mostly you don't manage it at all: marking the big bill Posted draws the fund down and re-aims it at the next occurrence by itself. It only counts a bill you actually posted — an “Automatic” bill is still just a plan, so a fund is never spent on one, and a bill you didn't pay this cycle leaves the fund exactly where it is.
Change the bill and the fund follows. Edit its schedule or its amount — say you find it runs in October, not August — and the fund re-aims at the new due date and re-paces its payday set-asides to land by then, keeping everything you've saved so far. We'll tell you when that happens. What doesn't move is a fund that's simply past due: if the bill really is owed, it keeps saying so until you post it.
Two actions live on it for the cases that need a hand. “Paid it — reset” does the same drawdown manually — for a bill you paid outside the app, or one you'd already posted before the fund existed; if the bill isn't due yet, it asks first, because resetting early stops that cycle's saving. “Stop smoothing” turns the fund off and removes its payday contributions.
Because that money was already set aside over the earlier paydays, it isn't owed again from the paycheck the bill lands on. The covered amount nets out of that period's “Bills” total and comes back as a “From fund” credit, so the period reads calm instead of “Short.” Your “Free” for the period is unchanged — the money was simply saved earlier instead of paid now.
If the fund isn't full yet, only the part you've actually saved is credited; the rest still shows as owed that month.
No — it's the shared-balance split. Giving a goal an earlier due date (or pinning it) lets it take its share first, leaving less for the others.
Pin amounts with “Set aside” (“Given” in the Giving Studio) if you want a goal's share to stay fixed no matter what the others do.
No. They're identical tools but completely separate — separate balances, separate goals, separate money. Anything you do in one never touches the other.