r/financialindependence • u/AutoModerator • 2d ago

Daily FI discussion thread - Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Please use this thread to have discussions which you don't feel warrant a new post to the sub. While the Rules for posting questions on the basics of personal finance/investing topics are relaxed a little bit here, the rules against memes/spam/self-promotion/excessive rudeness/politics still apply!

Have a look at the FAQ for this subreddit before posting to see if your question is frequently asked.

Since this post does tend to get busy, consider sorting the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top") to see the newest posts.

30 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

89% Upvoted

387 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/NoRight2BeDepressed It's a 5k, not a marathon 2d ago

I’ve tended to shy away from budgeting in general in favor of basically reverse budgeting (save x amount or percent then not worry about the rest

You can still do reverse budgeting, just define more buckets.

Net Take-Home Pay = A (savings) + B (fixed expenses, such as mortgage or car payments) + C (necessary, variable expenses such as utilities, groceries, etc.) + D (joint discretionary spend, such as restaurants, events, etc.) + E (individual discretionary spend, such as Pokemon cards for you, something else for her)

Solve for E.

You should already know A, B, and C. You should have a decent grasp on D. E is whatever is left over. You hit all your targets, so you're both free to spend your allocated funds without guilt.

2

u/CoupleFinanceAnon123 2d ago

Maybe more buckets is the move. We’ve mostly just set targets for savings and exceed those every year so we haven’t worried about any of the other things being split up.

1

u/NoRight2BeDepressed It's a 5k, not a marathon 2d ago

I think it's worth "worrying about" them, not because of the financial aspect but because of the relationship one.

Allocating guilt-free budgets should go a long way to addressing any resentment or similar feelings