Most people don’t have one savings goal. They have four, competing for the same monthly surplus — and no clear sense of what happens to the other three if they push money at the first.
Goal priorities is where you answer that.
How it works
Spendly works out your projected monthly surplus from your budget plan — planned income minus planned spending — and shows it as one figure. You then split that figure across your active savings goals.
As you move the amounts, every goal’s finish date moves with it, live. Put another £200 a month into the house deposit and you’ll see the holiday fund slip by four months in the same motion.
That trade-off is the whole point. It’s obvious in principle and almost impossible to hold in your head across four goals, two currencies and a set of deadlines.
It’s a scratchpad, not a commitment
The board is deliberately non-destructive. Move the numbers around as much as you like — nothing is written to your budgets or your goals, and nothing is transferred automatically. It’s for thinking, not for executing.
That means you can answer “what if I stopped the car fund for six months” without disturbing anything, then close the page and act on the answer however you want.
Currencies stay separate
Figures stay in each currency’s own money, grouped by currency.
If you’re saving toward a euro deposit and a sterling emergency fund, the board doesn’t blend them into a single number that implies a conversion you haven’t made. Each currency gets its own surplus and its own allocation — which is the honest way to show it, and the only way the finish dates mean anything.
What it’s good for
- Sequencing. Deciding whether to finish one goal fast or advance three slowly.
- Sanity-checking a deadline. If the numbers say the deposit lands in 2029, the goal needs a bigger contribution or a later date.
- Seeing the cost of a new goal. Add one and watch what it does to everything else before you commit.
- Reallocating after a change. A raise, a paid-off debt, or a finished sinking fund frees up monthly money — this is where you decide where it goes.
Where the surplus figure comes from
It’s derived from your budget plan rather than your bank balance: planned income minus planned spending, per currency. That makes it a projection of what you should have spare each month if the plan holds — not a claim about money currently sitting in an account.
For the shorter-horizon version of the same question, see the cash flow forecast, which projects your actual balance about 90 days out.