Recurring cash flow

A recurring item is defined by its schedule, not its amount. A streaming subscription can charge the same amount each month; an electric bill can arrive each month at a different amount. Both are recurring. Spending that happens often but on no schedule, such as groceries, is not recurring in this sense.

Items on different intervals are compared through a monthly equivalent: the amount, times the number of times it lands in a year, divided by 12. A $600 insurance bill twice a year is $100 a month.

Biweekly and semi-monthly are different intervals. Biweekly means every 14 days, 26 pay dates per 52 weeks, so a single month holds two or three. Semi-monthly means twice a month, 24 times a year. At 26 pay dates a year, a $2,000 paycheck is worth $4,333 a month; semi-monthly, it is worth $4,000.

A household is paid $2,000 every 14 days, taken as 26 paychecks a year. It pays $1,500 in rent a month, $600 for car insurance twice a year, $15 a month for streaming and $120 a year for a membership.

On a monthly basis the paycheck is $2,000 × 26 ÷ 12, or $4,333. The outgoing items come to $1,625 a month, 37.5% of that take-home.

Rent, monthly

$1,500

Car insurance, $600 × 2 ÷ 12

+ $100

Streaming, monthly

+ $15

Membership, $120 ÷ 12

+ $10

Recurring outflow, a month

$1,625

Take-home, $2,000 × 26 ÷ 12

÷ $4,333

Share of take-home

37.5%

Recurring outflow is the spending a month starts with. Its share of take-home, 37.5% in the example, is the part of the month's income that arrives already spoken for.

A long-interval item is missing from the months it doesn't land in. The $600 insurance bill shows up in two months of the year and in none of the other ten, but on a monthly basis it is $100 in every month.

Taiga Finance's Recurring page lists the paychecks, bills and subscriptions it finds repeating in the transactions, one row per commitment, in bands by cadence, from weekly to annual, with irregular last. A row shows the merchant, its category, the next expected date and the estimated amount, income with a leading +. A band's header counts its rows.

In the rail, the “Of take-home” gauge divides the monthly run-rate of recurring outflow, each amount times how often it lands in a year, over 12, by take-home: the monthly take-home set on the Plan, or, when none is set, the monthly amount of the recurring income it has found. The “Exclude housing” chip and the page's filters narrow the outflow side. Hovering the gauge shows the dollars behind the share.

Detection groups transactions by merchant, account and direction, and fits the gaps between charges to a cadence.