Guide

Budgeting for 1099 & gig income

No employer is withholding your taxes, no paycheck arrives on the 1st and 15th, and a great month can sit right next to a dead one. Budgeting still works — it just has to be built around payments, not months.

Why monthly budgets fail freelancers

A monthly budget starts with a number: what you make in a month. If you're a 1099 worker, that number is a guess — and every month the guess is wrong in a different direction. The fix isn't a better guess. It's dropping the month as the unit of planning and using the unit your income actually arrives in: the payment.

Five things every irregular budget has to cover

Taxes first. Nobody is withholding for you. A fixed share of every payment gets set aside the day it lands, before it feels like spending money. (What share depends on your situation — ask a tax professional.)
A cushion for thin months. The gap between gigs is not an emergency; it's a known feature of the work. The cushion is what turns a slow stretch from a crisis into a plan.
Debt, with a finish line. If you're carrying debt, give it a fixed share and a projected payoff date — a date changes behavior in a way a balance never does.
Retirement, eventually. Small and automatic beats large and someday.
What's truly yours to spend. Whatever remains after the first four is real spending money — no guilt, no second-guessing, because everything else is already handled.

The routine: split every payment the night it lands

Percentages make this a five-minute habit. Payment arrives → enter it → see the split in dollars → move the money at your own bank → confirm what you moved. Big month, small month, same routine. Consistency comes from the shares staying fixed while the dollars flex.

Track the gap, not just the plan

The plan you set and the money you actually move will drift apart. That gap is the signal: if you planned to stow a quarter of every payment and keep confirming less, the percentage is wrong — or the spending is. Either way, you can only fix what you can see, so a system that records actuals beats one that only records intentions.

Where Float fits

Float is a free, offline app built exactly for this routine: you set your split once, enter each payment as it lands, confirm what you stowed, and it shows whether your plan held — and which payday clears your debt, fills your cushion, or starts retirement. It runs entirely in your browser, with no account and no bank connection.

Try Float free

All figures are estimates; Float does not provide tax, legal, or financial advice.