Manual: Budget hub

The Budget hub is where money in and money out get entered - Income, Spending and Cashflow are three views onto the same underlying numbers, switchable as panels on one screen.

Income panel

Add every source of money coming in as an income stream: salary, freelance, rental, investment, pension or other. Each stream has a monthly amount and optional start and end dates - use these to model a raise, a contract ending, or a pension starting at a future age.

• Rental income and dividend/investment income you've already logged as holdings on the Portfolio panel are added automatically here - you don't double-enter them.
• Toggle whether a stream should grow with inflation - a salary with regular raises behaves differently in a long-run projection than a fixed pension payment.

Spending panel

Add every recurring cost as a budget item, and mark each one essential or discretionary. That split isn't cosmetic - it's what Wealth multiple compares your net worth against, and what the Flexibility resilience check is built from, so draw the line the way you actually would in a real pinch: essential is what keeps running no matter what, discretionary is what you'd cut first.

• Debt repayments and property-maintenance costs from items you've added on the Portfolio panel appear here automatically, alongside anything you enter by hand.
• One-time cash flows - a bonus, a big purchase, a tax bill - go in as a separate list with a fixed date, rather than a recurring monthly item, so they hit the projection once instead of every month.

Cashflow panel

Cashflow takes everything from Income and Spending, plus your portfolio's expected returns, and projects it month by month and year by year - a running view of money in, money out, and the balance compounding (or shrinking) over time. It's the one place that shows the raw projection before Insights condenses it into scored measures; if a number on Insights looks surprising, Cashflow is where to see why.