Know your lifestyle floor.

Your lifestyle floor is the minimum amount of money you need every month to keep your life running — not to go out, not to save, not to invest. Just to exist at your current standard.

Rent or mortgage. Electricity and water. Your phone plan. The streaming services you actually use. The gym you go to. Add them up. That total is your floor.

Concrete example: rent €850, utilities €110, phone €25, subscriptions €40, gym €30 — that's €1,055 per month. You need at least €1,055 before you can think about anything else.

Most budgeting apps start by asking for your bank login. They pull in every transaction — the coffee, the takeout, the app you forgot you subscribed to three years ago. You spend two hours categorizing. Two weeks later you've stopped using it.

That work doesn't help you make big decisions. You already know you bought a coffee. What you don't know — what almost nobody knows off the top of their head — is the fixed number beneath all those variable expenses.

Your lifestyle floor is the number you need when a friend asks whether you could afford to move cities. When your employer offers a four-day week with a 20% pay cut. When you're deciding whether to go freelance. In those moments you need one number, not a transaction history.

You don't need software. Open your phone's notes app and write down four categories:

1. Housing — rent or mortgage. One line. Your biggest fixed cost.
2. Utilities — electricity, water, gas, internet, phone plan. Usually three to six lines.
3. Subscriptions — streaming, software, news, cloud storage. Anything billed monthly or annually (divide annual costs by 12).
4. Health & lifestyle — gym, health insurance premium if it's a fixed amount, any recurring wellness expense.

Add them up. That number is your floor.

Two rules: only include costs that recur regardless of what you do this month. Skip groceries and dining out — those vary. Skip savings — that's a goal, not a floor.

Evaluating a new apartment: you're looking at a place that costs €200 more per month. With your floor in hand, you know immediately whether your income covers the new total — and by how much. No spreadsheet needed.

Going freelance or switching jobs: your floor is the minimum monthly revenue you need before taking the leap. If your floor is €1,400 and the freelance contract pays €1,800, you have €400 of breathing room. That's your risk calculation.

Planning a sabbatical or unpaid leave: multiply your floor by the number of months you want off. Add a 20% buffer. That's your savings target. Nothing more complicated.

The common thread: the floor turns financial anxiety into one concrete number. Once you know it, decisions get cleaner.

BillSight is a free iOS and Android app built around this single idea. You input your fixed costs once — rent, utilities, subscriptions, gym — and the app shows your monthly and annual total. That's the floor.

No bank connection. No account to create. No transaction categorization. Your data lives in a local SQLite database on your phone and never leaves it. The app is supported by small, non-intrusive AdMob banner ads.

If you need full transaction tracking, YNAB or Monarch are better tools for that. If you want to know your number quickly — without giving anyone your bank password — BillSight is built for exactly that.