Household finance, by the numbers
One family — $52,000 a year, $4,333 a month take-home, paid every two weeks, $18,000 of debt — runs every popular budgeting method, one month at a time, and every number stays on screen.
What the first test found
Two paychecks a month, $2,000 each. Week one feels fine — you just got paid. Week two digs the hole: bills land before the second paycheck does, and by day 14 this family is $841 underwater. Day 15, paycheck two lands and covers it — with $8.36 left over for the next fifteen days. Day 17 is the first grocery run of week three. That's the day the month ends.
Not overspending. Timing. That's what budgeting by paycheck fixes.
| Day | What happens | Balance |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | Balance goes below $0 | — |
| 14 | Bottoms out | −$841 |
| 15 | Paycheck two lands and covers it | $8.36 |
| 17 | First grocery run of week three — the month ends | — |
The method behind the methods
Two earners, $70,564 a year gross, $4,333 a month take-home, paid every two weeks, $18,000 of debt, Greensboro, NC. The household never changes — only the budgeting method under test does.
50/30/20, zero-based, cash envelopes, snowball vs. avalanche, pay-yourself-first, and more — each one run for a full month against the exact same numbers, so methods can actually be compared instead of judged one at a time.
Every test runs inside a spreadsheet you can download free, prefilled with the same figures. Change them to yours and it recalculates. Nothing here has to be taken on faith.
Coming Friday, August 21
Not just whether a method worked — whether it was worth your time. The Method Scoreboard ranks every test by dollars found per hour spent, with a hard pass/fail: if the balance ever goes below zero, it doesn't matter what the method found.
In progress
The free sheet is the one-month version. I'm building the full system — a paycheck-by-paycheck tracker with a debt payoff module and sinking funds built in, tested the same way as everything else. It gets built once enough people ask for it, not before.
Free, prefilled with the test family's numbers. Change them to yours and it recalculates.
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