The $500 cushion in my checking account hit a goal I didn't even set

For real, I opened my banking app on a Sunday night just to make sure a bill cleared, and the balance after everything was $500.13. I sat there staring at it. Not a big number to most people, I know. But this time last winter I was moving money from savings to cover a $40 gas bill, so crossing a flat $500 and leaving it alone felt strange. I run a small house cleaning business here in Fort Wayne, and my income comes in weird chunks. Some weeks are fat, some are nothing. So I started the rule of keeping exactly $500 in checking as a floor. If a job pays out, anything above that goes to the savings account. If a slow stretch eats into it, I stop spending and clean extra houses on the weekend. The part that got me was I never picked $500 for any real reason. It just seemed like the line between broke and not broke. What number do you all keep in your checking as your floor, and did you pick it on purpose or just make it up like I did?

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troy_ward1d ago

Mine is $300 and I also made it up. I basically did the same thing you did, set a floor and sweep anything above it into savings, and the floor thing works because it's a number you can see without doing math. The trick for me was picking a number low enough that a slow week doesn't blow through it, because once I had to dip into the floor a couple times in a row I quit trusting it. Sounds like $500 is working for you, so I'd just leave it and not overthink why you picked it.

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