If this is the first thing you read here, start here. Everything else on this site assumes you know these three numbers.
Number one: your true monthly take-home
Not your salary. Not your gross pay. The amount that actually lands in your checking account on the last business day of the month, averaged over the last three months.
This sounds obvious and almost nobody does it. On the 2024 returns I reviewed in my final busy season, the median W-2 wage line was $62,480 — but after federal withholding, FICA, and a typical 401(k) contribution, the household’s real monthly inflow was closer to $3,900 than the $5,200 the clients kept quoting me. Every budget that failed that year failed because it was built on the bigger number.
Open your bank’s transaction history, find the last three payroll deposits, add them, divide by three. Write it down. That’s number one.
Number two: your fixed floor
Add up every obligation that would follow you if you moved to a cheaper apartment tomorrow in a worse city: rent or mortgage, insurance premiums, minimum debt payments, childcare, the phone plan you’re contracted into.
The Federal Reserve’s 2024 well-being survey found that 63% of adults would cover a $400 emergency from cash on hand — which means for 37% of households, the fixed floor is the budget. If your floor is above 70% of number one, no amount of discipline in the variable categories will save the month. That’s not a platitude; that’s division.
| Line item | Marcus’s floor, Jan 2026 |
|---|---|
| Rent (Columbus, 1BR) | $1,450 |
| Utilities (gas, electric, water) | $186 |
| Renters + auto insurance | $141 |
| Auto loan minimum | $312 |
| Student loan minimum | $268 |
| Internet + phone | $95 |
| Fixed floor | $2,452 |
Number three: last month’s variable spend
Everything else — groceries, restaurants, gas, subscriptions, the purchase you don’t remember. Pull it from your card statements for the month that just closed. Not an estimate. The statement.
The BEA puts the national personal savings rate at 4.6% as of December 2025. If number one minus number two minus number three is negative, you are the reason that number is what it is, and knowing it in the first week of the month instead of the last week of the quarter is the entire game.
You don’t need a budgeting app. You need three numbers and the habit of writing them down on the first Saturday of every month.
What you can ignore
Net worth trackers. Category-level granularity beyond five buckets. Any dashboard that asks you to log coffee. In eight busy seasons I never once saw a return improve because the client tracked lattes — I saw plenty improve because the client knew their floor to the dollar.
Once you have your three numbers, read why I stopped using the 50/30/20 rule — it’s the natural next step, and it explains why the most famous budget in America breaks for exactly the households that need it most.
Figures in the table are from my own January 2026 ledger. National figures are cited in the sources below.