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Income & Expenses: categories, periods, passive

Income and Expenses: categorise, normalise periods (weekly / fortnightly / monthly / yearly), flag passive income, opt into Lean FIRE, drag-sort categories in Settings.
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Quick start

The Income & Expenses screen lets you add recurring money-in and money-out items. Each item has an amount, a period, a category, and a few optional flags.

  • Amount + period — enter what you earn/spend and how often (weekly, fortnightly, monthly, yearly). FirePath normalises everything to monthly for the Dashboard summary.
  • Category — group items so the Dashboard can show breakdowns (Salary, Rent, Groceries, etc.).
  • Passive flag (income only) — ticks this one into the Dashboard's Passive Income card.
  • Include in Lean FIRE (expense only, premium) — controls whether this expense is counted in your Lean FIRE target.

The rest of this guide is for users who want to tune the screen. If you're happy with the defaults, you can stop here — everything below is optional customisation.

Going deeper

Period normalisation

Period chip on an Expense row
① Period chip (weekly / fortnightly / monthly / yearly). ② Normalised annual total drives FIRE and summary.

FirePath supports weekly, fortnightly, monthly, and yearly periods. Under the hood everything is normalised to a monthly figure for the Dashboard and the FIRE calculator. A weekly expense of $200 becomes $866.67/month (52 weeks ÷ 12); a yearly tax bill of $12,000 becomes $1,000/month. You enter the figure in the period that's natural for you; the app does the conversion.

Passive vs active income

Income edit form with Passive toggle
① Passive toggle — feeds the Dashboard Passive Income card.

Toggle Passive Income on any income item that arrives without active work: rental net income, dividends, distributions, royalties, interest. Active income (salary, freelance fees, side-hustle) stays toggled off. The Dashboard's Passive card sums the ticked ones; the difference between total and passive is your active income.

This split matters because FIRE is ultimately about replacing active income with passive income. Watching the ratio move over time is one of the most motivating views in the app.

Include in Lean FIRE (expenses)

Expense edit form with Include in Lean FIRE toggle
① Include-in-Lean-FIRE toggle. ② On = essential. Off = would be cut in Lean retirement.

Lean FIRE is the version where you retire on the absolute minimum — rent/mortgage, food, insurance, utilities, basic transport. Everything else (dining out, travel, hobbies, luxury subscriptions) is excluded.

Each expense has an Include in Lean FIRE toggle. On by default (every expense counts in your current spend); turn off the ones you'd cut in a Lean scenario. The FIRE calculator's Lean variant uses the sum of the included expenses to compute the Lean target.

Category personalisation

Settings → App Lists → Income Categories / Expense Categories lets you shape the category list to your life. The built-in categories can be hidden (to stop them appearing on the Add screen) and reordered (so your most-used appear first), but not renamed — the built-ins are fixed. If you want a name that doesn't ship with the app, add a custom category; your own categories are fully renameable and deletable. Renaming a custom category cascades automatically: every income/expense row referencing the old name gets updated.

Make it yours — Settings that affect this screen

  • Income Categories — Settings → App Lists. Reorder and hide the built-in categories; add your own custom ones (which you can then rename or delete freely).
  • Expense Categories — same pattern.
  • Default Annual / Monthly view — Settings → Display → Default Annual Summary. Controls whether Income & Expenses open in monthly view (off) or annual view (on) by default. The period on each individual item is independent of this — this just picks which total the screen shows at the top.

Questions or feedback? Email us at woohoosoftware@gmail.com