Wiggle Budget: know what your money can handle next

What Wiggle Budget does

Wiggle Budget is a forward-looking budgeting app. Instead of categorising what you already spent, it places your income and obligations on a timeline and computes a running balance for every day ahead, so the day money gets tight is visible weeks before it arrives. Your bank balance tells you what you have. Wiggle Budget tells you what is already spoken for.

Questions Wiggle Budget answers

How much can I safely spend today?

Wiggle Budget projects your balance forward day by day and finds the lowest point it reaches before your next income. That low point, not your bank balance, is what you can actually spend.

When can I afford this?

Name an amount and Wiggle Budget returns the first date it fits without pushing any day below zero. Name a date instead and it returns the largest amount that fits on that day. The figure is exact rather than a range.

Can I afford a mortgage, a car loan, or a lease?

A repeating payment is not a purchase. Every instalment lowers every day after it, so Wiggle Budget sizes the largest monthly payment your plan carries for the whole term, which is far below what you could spend once.

What happens if I spend this?

Drop a hypothetical expense or income onto the timeline and the projection recalculates. Nothing is written and nothing is committed; you see whether the plan still holds.

Which day does my money get tight?

The timeline marks the first day each account goes below zero, which is a different question from where its lowest point is. An account whose worst day is a year out but which first dips next week needs action next week.

Can I move money between my own accounts to cover a shortfall?

Wiggle Budget works out a schedule rather than a single lump sum: how much to move, from which account, on which day. Each amount is capped at what the source still has at its own lowest point, so covering one account never empties another.

What are my recurring payments really costing me?

Recurring payments are held as templates you define once. Wiggle Budget totals them per month across mixed frequencies, so weekly, biweekly and annual charges can be compared honestly, and can plan a whole month from them in one step.

Which debt should I pay off first?

Wiggle Budget compares snowball against avalanche on your own balances and rates, shows what each debt costs you in interest per day and per month, and reports your debt-to-income ratio.

What changed since last month?

Two periods are compared directly, with the differences listed rather than left for you to spot. Entries can be grouped and ranked by category, by group, or by type.

What will my balance be on a specific day?

Pick any future date and Wiggle Budget reports the projected balance for it, for one account or across the whole plan.

The assistant is not sent your amounts

Wiggle Budget connects to Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants over the Model Context Protocol. Most finance connectors work by sending your transactions to the model so it can read them and answer. This one does not.

When you ask a question, the calculation runs inside Wiggle Budget, against your encrypted data, under database rules that only ever expose your own rows. The assistant receives a receipt saying what was worked out and where to see it, plus at most a count, a date, or a yes or no. Your balances, amounts, category names and account names stay in the app.

This is enforced rather than promised. A list of forbidden fields is checked on every response before it leaves the server, and the build fails if a value that should not travel appears in one. You can raise disclosure yourself if you want the figures in the conversation, and it is off unless you turn it on.

• Financial values are encrypted at the column level in the database, not merely on the disk beneath it.
• Row-level security is enforced in PostgreSQL on every table holding your data, so a fault in application code cannot show your rows to another account.
• Connector access uses OAuth with PKCE, and a token can be revoked from settings at any time.
• No bank login exists to opt out of, because there is no bank connection at all.

How it works

1. Enter what you actually have. Type in your current balance. There is no sync to wait on and no history to reconstruct, so falling behind for a fortnight costs you a minute rather than an evening of re-categorising.
2. Place income and bills on the dates they land. Irregular income is placed on the days it genuinely arrives rather than assumed monthly. If payday moves, you move it and the projection follows.
3. Read the line forward. Wiggle Budget computes a running balance for every day ahead and shows the highest and lowest points. The day money gets tight is visible weeks before it arrives.
4. Ask what you were going to work out anyway. Whether Saturday is affordable, what a car payment does to next spring, whether moving money between your accounts fixes a gap. These are answered from your own numbers, in the app.

Common complaints about budgeting apps

The app says I have money that is already spent

Bank feeds lag. You pay on Friday, it clears Tuesday, and until then the balance is a lie you are making decisions against. Mark an entry processed the moment you pay it. Your spendable number drops straight away rather than waiting on a sync.

I fell behind and now the whole thing is wrong

Most apps expect an unbroken history. Miss two weeks and fixing it means re-categorising hundreds of rows before the numbers mean anything again. Type in your current bank balance and everything ahead recalculates from that point. Falling behind costs you a minute, not an evening.

I do not want to hand over my bank login

Linking an account gives a third party standing read access to every transaction you make, usually so it can be sold back to you as insight. There is no bank connection at all. You enter what you choose, and the financial fields are encrypted before they are stored.

It tells me what I spent, not what I can spend

A category report is a description of the past. It cannot tell you whether Saturday is affordable. Your balance is projected forward by date, so you can see the lowest point it reaches before payday and decide from that.

Every free app turns into a subscription

Free tiers get hollowed out, and the feature you actually came for ends up behind the paywall six months later. The free plan is a plan, not a trial. The Pro Max trial runs 30 days and does not ask for a card.

Budgeting apps assume a steady salary

Envelope systems and monthly budgets fall apart when income is irregular, which it is for a lot of people now. You place income on the dates it actually arrives. If payday moves, you move it, and the projection follows.