I Gave Up on Budget Tracking (And Built Fairway — It Shows Two Key Numbers)
Budget Name: Fairway
Budget Style: Cash-flow forecasting / day-by-day balance projection (not zero-based, not envelope, not category budgeting)
How similar do you consider your budget to YNAB?
Deliberately different. YNAB and most tools here felt like rear-view mirrors. I was always looking backwards, sorting spending into buckets, but never looking forward to see where I was actually headed. Fairway is purely forward-looking and it projects your checking-account balance day by day so you can see what’s coming.
I got tired of still being surprised by my bank balance even when the categories were perfect. So I built the thing that simply projects your actual checking balance forward and surfaces the only two numbers that mattered to me:
• the low point (the worst upcoming balance day in the forecast — it can be months or even years out)
• runway (how many months of cushion your current checking + savings will last if income stopped today)
Given that every bill was typed in, those two numbers gave me the most comfort.
No bank linking required. No spend categories as the product. Everything lands on a clean calendar view. I also built it around a few other things that matter to me: quick 50/30/20 glance, person totals (me / spouse / joint), and a debt section that auto-sorts payoff order the way you want (avalanche or snowball). Everything funnels into a rolling calendar — you can literally forecast decades ahead if you want, just keep scrolling.
Free spouse account. 7-day free trial, no card needed.
For me personally it’s a daily habit: type in today’s checking balance, check my “okay number” (the floor I don’t want to go below, for me that is $7,500), and immediately see the low point in my forecast so I can decide whether to cut something, pick up extra hours, or just leave it alone.
https://fairwayforecasting.com/#lowpoint
Question for people who left YNAB or still get caught off guard by their balance even when they “budget”:
Do you think seeing your low point coming would actually change how you manage your money, or is zero-based still the only thing that works for you?
Happy to answer anything.