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Make Savings Rate meaningful for users who don't live paycheck-to-paycheck

Feature Request

The situation

Savings Rate today compares the money that came in during a month to the money that went out during that same month. That works perfectly if you spend this month what you earned this month.

But some of us here don't. We keep a buffer. We budget a month or several months ahead. That's literally what the app teaches us to do — and the better we get at it, the less our monthly spending is funded by that month's income.

So the chart starts telling us about our payroll calendar instead of our habits:

  • You put money aside in February, and the month it finally gets spent shows up as a huge expense with no income facing it. Your rate tanks — for doing exactly the right thing.

  • A bonus, a 13th month or a holiday allowance lands, and that month reads +65%. The next few months look terrible by comparison.

  • Pay your annual insurance, your taxes, or book the family holiday, and one month goes deep red even though nothing about your finances changed.

My own last 12 months read −109%, +65%, +59%, −19%. My habits didn't swing by 170 points in three months. The chart is measuring when money moved, not how much I actually keep.

What would fix it

None of this requires throwing the widget away — mostly it's about what we're shown by default:

  1. Lead with a rolling 12-month figure rather than a single month?
    Over a full year the timing effects cancel out and the number becomes real. Keep the monthly bars as context.

  2. Smooth out the one-offs?
    An option to spread annual expenses (taxes, insurance, big trips) across the year, the same way the app already thinks about true expenses on the budget side.

  3. Longer term, an alternative basis that timing can't distort — for example measuring what you allocated to savings and investment categories out of the income you received, or the growth of your net worth excluding market moves. Either one answers "how much do I actually keep?" regardless of when the money moves.

Even just item 1 and 2 would make the widget trustworthy for a large chunk of users.

If your Savings Rate chart also looks like a heart monitor, give this a vote!

Status: Completed3 comments

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Comments3

  • Pedro

    Team•

    Sep 4

    Thanks for writing this up.

    The monthly number was measuring when money moved, not how much you keep. If you budget a month ahead (which is the whole point), the chart ends up describing your payroll calendar.

    Your item 1 is done and just merged. Savings Rate now leads with a trailing figure: the headline is your rate over the last 12 months rather than one month, the chart's Trailing view plots that rolling number month by month, and the Monthly view keeps the raw bars for context. The dashboard widget does the same over the last 12 complete months, so a bonus or an annual bill gets absorbed into the year instead of spiking a single month. The caption always names exactly which months the number covers, so there's no guessing.

    Your −109% / +65% / +59% / −19% should settle into one honest figure.

    One more thing coming eventually: viewing analytics grouped by quarter, half year and year instead of only by month. That'll help this chart and a few others.

    • Emerald Milkyway

      •

      Sep 5

      Thank you @Pedro!

  • Harlequin Star

    •

    Aug 6

    I just added a feature request to at least add a time filter in the income vs expense dashboard to be able to summarize it by year (or even by quarter). I think that would already help with this since it would smooth it out (your #2). But yeah, agree with this!