Some of your fixed costs don't arrive every month. Insurance might come quarterly, a membership yearly. If you only counted them when they hit your account, some months would look artificially wealthy and others would feel like a crisis.
By dividing each cost by its billing interval, the app spreads that cost evenly across every month. This gives you a stable, predictable picture of what you can actually spend, even before the bill arrives.
Here's exactly how each of your fixed costs contributes to your monthly budget: what you're billed against what's set aside each month.
Life events like holidays, car repairs and family occasions are foreseeable but easy to ignore when budgeting. The Life Buffer prevents that.
For each upcoming event, the app calculates how many months remain until the payment is due, then divides the cost across those months. That monthly contribution is reserved automatically from your available money.
If your spending exceeds your available money in any given month, that shortfall becomes "carried debt" and rolls into the next month automatically.
This isn't meant to make you feel bad. It's meant to keep your view of reality accurate. Ignoring overspending doesn't make it disappear. Acknowledging it is the first step to recovering from it.
Savings are deducted from your available money before anything else. They're treated as a non-negotiable cost, not an afterthought. This is the "pay yourself first" principle.