Budgets and Remaining Budget

Budgets and Remaining Budget 📊

Traditional budgeting apps are designed for people with fixed salaries and fixed rent. Vanlife is entirely different. Some weeks you spend nothing while wild camping in a forest; the next week you drop a massive amount of money on a ferry crossing and a broken alternator.

To handle this, Vanlife Assistant uses a dynamic pacing system built around Scenarios, Burn Rates, and Variance.

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🎯 The “Active Plan” (Your Budget)

In Vanlife Assistant, your budget is actually just a Scenario that you have flagged as your Active Plan.

When you set up the app (or create a new Scenario), you assign target monthly amounts to your categories (e.g., Groceries: £300, Fuel: £200). By marking this scenario as “Active,” you are telling the app: “This is the baseline I want to measure myself against.” 👉 Learn how to set these up in Understanding Financial Scenarios.

📉 Daily Cost & Burn Rate

Because monthly spending on the road is so spiky, the most important metric to watch is your Daily Burn Rate.

On the main Money dashboard, the Daily Cost Card takes your recent spending, ignores the empty days where you spent nothing, and calculates exactly how much it costs you to exist on the road per day.

• Example: If your Daily Burn Rate is £45/day, and you have £4,500 left in the bank, you know you have exactly 100 days of travel left.

⚖️ Plan vs Reality (The Magic Metric)

At the bottom of the Money dashboard is the Plan vs Reality Card. This is arguably the most powerful tool in the app.

Instead of just telling you if you are over or under your monthly limit, it calculates your Runway Impact.

1. The Math: The app looks at exactly how many days you have been tracking your finances. It takes your Active Plan’s monthly budget and calculates exactly what you should have spent by today (pro-rata).
2. The Reality Bar: It then draws a bar representing your Actual spending next to your Planned spending.
3. Runway Impact: If you are under budget, the bar turns green, and the app tells you exactly how many bonus days of travel you have earned! If you are over budget, the bar turns red and shows you how many days you have lost.

📊 Category Breakdowns (Where did the money go?)

If your Plan vs Reality bar is glowing red and you want to know why, tap the Actual Performance card at the top of the dashboard.

This opens a detailed breakdown comparing your actual ledger entries against your planned category limits for the current month.

• You will see progress bars for each category (e.g., Fuel, Groceries, Campsites).
• If you set £200 for Fuel and have spent £150, the bar will be 75% full, showing you have £50 remaining for the month.

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What’s Next?

Now that you understand how the app tracks your current reality, let’s look at how it predicts the future! 👉 Check out Understanding Financial Scenarios.