Know what you can spend, without tracking a single expense

The Namup method: five movements, one number, and a clear head for the rest of the month.

Page updated 18 August 2026

The problem is not that you spend too much

By the twenty eighth the account is lower than you expected. Maybe you have no idea where it went. Maybe you know exactly where it went, because you have kept a spreadsheet since your first job and it is up to date, and knowing has not helped. Either way the same thing is missing, and it is not discipline.

For a great many people the amount itself moves. A bonus that lands once a year, a commission that follows the quarter, work invoiced on delivery rather than on a fixed date, a reimbursement that arrives three weeks late. When the income is never twice the same, the question stops being where the money went. It becomes which figure you are entitled to reason on.

Then come the months that hurt, and you know every one of their dates in advance. Rent asked for the whole year, or split into two cheques that fall when they fall. School fees at the start of each term. The flights home in the summer, for four people. Every year you promise yourself you will be ready for them, and every year they arrive like a surprise.

And there is the line no budgeting app knows what to do with. What you send home each month, without ever missing it. The tools file it under a catch-all heading at best, and at worst under whatever survives once everything else is paid, when in fact you send it before your own holiday. Money you promised to someone is not spending money.

The problem is not that you spend too much. It is that nobody has ever told you how much you can spend.

Why tracking your expenses settles nothing

The answer you hear everywhere is to record all of it. The morning coffee, the parking, the school shoes. Expense-tracking apps are built on that idea, and it is the reason most people abandon them before the first month is out.

Two things are wrong, and the second is the serious one. The first is the chore: nobody logs every purchase for years on end. The second is that even if you kept it perfectly, what you would hold is an exact inventory of money that has already gone, and not one line about what you can afford next week.

Knowing where the money went does not tell you how much is left to live on.

What Namup does instead

Namup turns the question around. Instead of rebuilding your past one purchase at a time, it settles in advance, before the month starts, the amount you can spend freely without touching what you owe or what you are building.

You declare three things, once. What comes in, what is already promised, what your plans require. Namup holds all three back, spreads the year's heavy months across twelve months, and hands you a single figure. That figure has a name, the Available, and it is the only one you have to carry.

No expense to enter, no category to tick, no bank account to connect.

If your income changes from one month to the next, the method has an answer for that. It uses your floor, the lowest of your last six months, and never an average. An average promises what a thin month will not honour, and the good months are not there to be spent either. They fill the envelopes.

Two situations get confused here, and they are not the same problem. If the amount is what moves, a commission or uneven work, the floor is the right base. If the date is the only thing that moves, income that is certain but paid three weeks late, your income is not lower. It is shifted. Then the question is not how much you can spend, it is how much of a buffer you need so that the day of the transfer stops deciding your month.

The calculation is the same wherever your salary lands. What changes is the shape of the obligations: rent asked for a year at a time rather than month by month, school fees due by term, an end-of-service payment that is a lump sum and not a pension, a plan whose horizon is written on a residency permit, and a house going up in another country over a decade. The figures change. The line does not.

The calculation, in one line

Income is what comes in. Commitments are what is no longer yours, from rent to instalments, and the events whose dates you already know count there just as the rent does. Savings are the share your plans require, held back inside the calculation and not taken from whatever survives the month.

That last point is what separates this figure from the one a lender produces about you. A lender looks at what survives once your charges are paid, and it looks in order to size a loan; whether your plans ever happen is not its question. This one puts your plans out of reach first, and only then tells you what is yours.

What remains after those three is spent without justifying it.

The same calculation, in a real household

A household of two salaries and two children, living on a residency permit with a country of origin behind it. The rent is asked for the whole year. The school fees fall due by term. And 560 leaves every month for parents back home, before any holiday of its own. The amounts are given in dollars, and the reasoning is identical in any currency and at any level of income. It holds just as well for one person renting alone, saving for something else entirely.

Here are its three totals, and the lines no budgeting tool knows how to name.

• Income8,000
• Commitments− 4,500
  • Rent, asked for the year and spread over twelve months2,100
  • Car instalment, a fixed margin financing400
  • Support to parents, back home560
• Savings− 1,600
  • Deposit for the home800
  • Retirement, funded entirely by the household320
  • Sadaqa, the regular gift130
• Available1,900

The deposit aimed at is 48,000. At 800 a month that puts the purchase 60 months out, five years, and the only thing that brings the date closer is raising the monthly figure.

That leaves 1,900 to spend without explaining it, while nothing that matters is left waiting.

And what about paying yourself first?

The formula is well known, it is sound, and it is incomplete. Pay yourself first settles the ORDER between saving and living: put the share aside before you live, not out of what survives. Namup keeps that order without arguing, and it is the third of its five movements.

What the formula never says is how much. It leaves the reader with an arbitrary percentage, ten or twenty depending on the author, without once looking at what the household actually owes each month or what it is preparing for. A rate that ignores a rent, an instalment and a term of school fees is not a method. It is a wish.

Pay yourself first gives you an order. Namup gives you an amount.

The five movements

The calculation gives you the figure. The five movements give you the order you use it in, and each one holds its own page.

• Recognise Know what you have, and make the most of it. Nothing is built on what you refuse to look at.
• Honour Serve your commitments before your comfort. What is promised is no longer mine, and admitting that is already keeping my word.
• Build Keep a share of every harvest to build. A dream becomes real the day it stops waiting its turn.
• Live Spend the rest freely, without guilt. What is left after honouring and building is spent without explaining yourself.
• Give Set your share, with its amount and its date. Money held back sleeps. Money that moves keeps people alive.

Work out what you can spend

Three amounts from you, and Namup hands back the fourth. Nothing is saved, nothing leaves this page, and there is no account to open: the calculation runs in your browser and disappears when you close the tab.

If you do not know an amount off the top of your head, open the panel and fill in what you do know.

Work in whatever currency your salary arrives in. This page converts nothing, because it holds one month in one currency. A plan that straddles two countries needs a rate and a horizon, and that is the app's work, not this page's.

Holding that figure every month

The calculation above is right today and starts ageing tomorrow: an instalment ends, a rent goes up, a plan gets closer, a heavy month approaches. Keeping that figure current by hand, every month, is the work the app does for you. That is the whole difference between this page and the app, and it is said plainly.

• Your Available, worked out again every month. Your commitments, the year's heavy months and your plans live in one plan. You declare what changed, in seconds, and the figure follows. Still no expense to enter.
• Ask Namup, when you have to decide. A question asked in plain English, answered on your own figures. What you can move forward on a plan, what a decision costs your month.
• Weighing a purchase before you commit. An idea for a purchase is measured against your Available rather than against how you feel that evening, and you see what it displaces before you decide.
• The Vault, for the paperwork. The documents that prove a commitment, kept where you find them again: a contract, a due date, a certificate.

Zakat, Tathir, Murabaha

Some households keep their accounts on principles that do not reduce to a rate of interest. Namup takes them seriously, and keeps that side switched off for everyone else: if this is not your situation, you never see it.

Zakat

It is worked out on what you already own, not on the month ahead: a threshold, a lunar year, and a share of the wealth itself. Namup shows the working, sets out the sourced differences between the references without ruling in your place, and leaves you to discharge it where you choose. The due itself never enters the one-line calculation further up, which covers a month and nothing else.

When you have the money, the Zakat is taken from what you own and paid, and nothing settles into your months. That is the ordinary case, and the method has nothing to add to it.

Then comes the case the tools skip, and it is the case of everyone who has built something. What you own is not always money you can reach: gold, goods held for sale, a property bought to be sold on, sums owed to you by people who have not paid yet. The share, though, is paid in cash. When it runs past what you have to hand, being told that this is not a monthly expense helps nobody. The money is short, and it has to be found.

Namup calls that a Zakat reserve, and it has no reason to exist in any other case. What gathers month by month is the reserve, never the due, which stays annual and which the app has you settle in one payment. The Zakat reserve counts among your commitments and lowers your Available, because money already owed is no longer money to spend. You can refuse it, and Namup never holds that money: it stays in your own accounts, and the reserve is only the marker.

To find what is missing, the app looks first at what you have already put by, before it asks anything of your month. Your Emergency reserve comes last. And before you touch it, you see what it would cost you, counted in months of expenses. Where your own date is not known, the method aims at 1 Ramadan, because that is when many people discharge it. It says so as an assumption rather than inventing a deadline, and your real date takes one tap to correct.

The references do not all say the same thing, and not on one point only: the threshold itself is not set the same way everywhere, and money already put by for your Zakat does not everywhere stay in next year's base. Namup applies the one you picked, shows you what it says where the answer is sourced, and tells you it is not where it is not. Ruling on that is not our work.

• Tathir. Interest received without having sought it is kept apart from the rest of the wealth instead of being blended into it, and it is followed as its own line so that it can be disposed of on its own. What the reference you selected asks for at that point, and what the sum does or does not count as, is what the app shows you, and it comes from that reference rather than from us.
• Murabaha. A fixed-margin financing is followed at its margin, known in advance and unchanging, rather than as a loan carrying interest. That is what the app does with it. Whether a particular contract holds up is a question about that contract, and about the authority you follow, and it is not one we answer.

The references you can pick between are named in the app: the High Council of Scholars of Morocco, the Council of Senior Scholars of Saudi Arabia, Egypt's Dar al-Ifta, and AAOIFI Standard No. 9. Our figures follow the published data of the one you select, and a figure meant to be paid should be checked against that reference before you pay it. On a question of doctrine the answer belongs to your own authority, never to us.

The book

These five pages hand you the method. The book tells it: where it came from, how it holds up in a real household living between two countries, and a set of sheets to print and fill in. The book is not open for download today. It is kept for those who leave an address, nothing is sent yet, and the list opens when the book does.

See the book's page

Starting

Namup is paid for, after a month's trial. The method is on this page, and it stays here.

Know what you can spend, without tracking a single expense Try Namup