Traditional budgets make a quiet assumption: that every month is the same. You allocate £X to groceries, £Y to transport, £Z to entertainment — as if life is a neat sequence of identical 30-day periods.
But think about your actual year. July brings school holidays and childcare costs triple. August has a cluster of family birthdays. September hits with both insurance renewals at once. By October you're wondering what happened. By November the budget is abandoned. By January you try again.
It's not your fault. The tool is too small for the job.
A year is bigger than twelve months
When you zoom out from a single month and look at the whole year, something becomes clear. Your financial life isn't just a repeating monthly cycle. It contains several different kinds of things, all happening at the same time.
There's your baseline — the ongoing rhythm of bills, groceries, commuting, subscriptions. This is what traditional budgets try to capture, and it's valid. But it's only one piece.
There are projects — temporary financial efforts with a beginning, middle, and end. Buying a car. Renovating a kitchen. Setting up a new baby's room. These aren't monthly expenses — they're life events with their own scope, timeline, and budget. And crucially, they finish.
There are goals — money being saved toward something specific. A summer holiday. A new laptop. A house deposit. Each with a target, a timeline, and a sense of progress.
And there are surprises — the boiler that dies in February, the car repair in October, the family emergency that needs a flight. You can't predict what they'll be. But you know something will come.
The predictable surprises
Here's the irony of personal finance: some of the things that catch you off guard happen every single year. The summer surge of holidays and birthdays. The September insurance renewals. The December Christmas ramp-up. They surprise you not because they're unexpected, but because monthly budgets can't see annual patterns.
If you could see your whole year at once — the quiet months and the expensive ones, the projects and the goals, the predictable surges and the buffer for the unpredictable — you'd approach your finances differently. Not with more discipline, but with more clarity.
Plans instead of budgets
A budget asks "how much can you spend this month?" A plan asks "what does your year actually look like?"
In Keep, you can see the full shape of your year — the baseline running costs, the active projects, the goals you're working toward, and the expensive seasons coming up. You can see how this month fits into that bigger picture, rather than looking at it in isolation.
This doesn't mean Keep ignores monthly spending. It just puts it in context. "You spent more in August" is much less stressful when you can see it was the holiday you'd been saving for since January.
Exploring possible futures
One of the most powerful things about thinking in plans rather than budgets is the ability to explore what-ifs. What if you overpaid the mortgage by £200 a month? What if interest rates rose to 6%? What if one of you took a career break?
These aren't predictions — they're explorations. And they're more useful than any monthly budget because they help you understand the shape of possible futures, with all the assumptions laid bare.
Keep shows every assumption behind every projection. You can adjust them, compare scenarios side by side, and make decisions based on honest information rather than false certainty.
Honest, not precise
Traditional financial planning loves to give you a single number: "You'll have £247,000 in your pension at retirement." That number assumes consistent contributions for 30 years, average returns matching historical data, no career breaks, no emergencies, and inflation behaving as predicted.
We think that's false precision. Life doesn't follow a single path. Keep shows multiple possible futures because that's what actually exists. The assumptions are always visible, always adjustable, and never hidden behind a confident-looking number.
A budget is a guess about a single month. A plan is an honest conversation about a whole year.