{"slug":"steady-paycheck","name":"Steady Paycheck (Variable Income)","category":"earn","tags":["freelance","gig","budgeting"],"tagline":"Turn an up-and-down income into a safe monthly salary and a right-sized buffer.","endpoint":"https://xearno.tools/api/v1/tools/steady-paycheck","page":"https://xearno.tools/t/steady-paycheck","description":"For freelancers, tipped workers, sellers, and seasonal earners: paste your last months of income and get the salary you can safely pay yourself, how big a buffer your actual swings require, and which months were spikes to bank rather than spend. The pay-yourself-a-salary method every advisor teaches by hand, as a calculator.","inputSchema":{"type":"object","properties":{"incomes":{"description":"Monthly income, most recent months Comma-separated, 3–24 months, any order. More months = a truer picture.","type":"array","items":{"type":"number"},"default":[3200,5400,2100,4800,3900,2600]},"essentials":{"description":"Essential monthly costs Rent, food, utilities, insurance, minimum debt payments — the must-pays.","type":"number","minimum":0,"default":2500},"buffer":{"description":"Cash buffer today What’s in the account that smooths the gaps. Leave 0 if none yet.","type":"number","minimum":0,"default":0}},"required":[],"additionalProperties":false},"methodology":["Safe salary = the 25th percentile of your entered months (linear interpolation): a floor that 3 of every 4 months clear. Budgeting to the average fails for volatile income because the average month is not a typical month — US Financial Diaries research found households swing 25%+ off their own average more than 5 months a year, with dips averaging −45%.","Income swing = coefficient of variation (standard deviation ÷ mean of your months, population form). The buffer target scales with it: ±<15% → 2 months of essentials, ±15–35% → 3, ±35–60% → 4.5, above → 6. Steadier income needs less cushion; spikier income needs more — a flat \"3 months\" rule ignores exactly the thing that makes variable income hard.","Spike months are months more than 25% above your average — the pay-yourself-a-salary method treats them as buffer deposits, not raises.","All computation happens from the numbers you paste; nothing is stored. This is a one-time snapshot — the hard part of variable-income budgeting is repeating it as each month lands."],"usage":"POST https://xearno.tools/api/v1/tools/steady-paycheck with a JSON body matching inputSchema."}