Is it better to budget weekly or monthly?

It is better to budget weekly if you get paid weekly or bi-weekly and you prefer to align your budget with your paychecks. However, if you don’t have time to review your budget every week and you’d rather align your budget with your monthly bills, a monthly budget may be better for you.

Whether you budget weekly or monthly really comes down to personal preference and what produces the best results. Making a budget and sticking to it over time are what really matter, regardless of the exact cadence. Picking the right frequency can increase your odds of success, though. To determine whether a weekly or monthly budget is better for you, you should look at the advantages that each type of budget offers.

Advantages of a Weekly Budget

Aligns with your paychecks. If you get paid weekly or bi-weekly, updating your budget on the same schedule can make it easier to plan out your spending. You won’t have to plan as far ahead, for one thing, and divvying up a week’s pay among a week’s expenses is very straightforward.  

Easy to manage. When you review your budget weekly, you should have fewer transactions to go over than you would with a monthly review schedule. Having less to review in one sitting makes it easier to spot errors.

Helps spot overspending quickly. You can quickly catch when you are overspending if you are reviewing your transactions every week rather than every month.

Makes saving more manageable. Breaking down a big savings goal into weekly targets can make saving money more feasible. For example, if you want to save $10,000 in a year, breaking it down into smaller goals of saving $193 per week can make the task seem less intimidating.

Advantages of a Monthly Budget

Less time-consuming. Instead of updating and reviewing your budget every week, you only have to do it once a month.

Aligns with monthly bills. Many expenses, such as your rent or mortgage, utilities, and credit card bills, are charged monthly. This makes it easy to incorporate them into your monthly budget without having to do math to split up the cost over a couple weeks, like you would need to do with a weekly budget.

Gives you a broad overview of your finances. You can spot patterns in your spending by analyzing your expenses from different months. You may not have enough data with a weekly budget to notice patterns, or your spending may not vary much within a couple of weeks.

Easier to make adjustments. If you overspend one week out of the month, you can adjust your budget later in the month to make up for the difference and not blow your budget.

To learn more, check out WalletHub’s weekly and monthly budget guides.