The budget app for nurses' irregular pay

Use the floor-budgeting method. Look at the last 12 weeks of paychecks and pick the lowest one — not the average. That's your planning income. Fixed expenses (rent, car, insurance, debt minimums) must fit under that number. Anything above the floor in a higher-pay week goes to a buffer category, which becomes next-month's income or savings. This is the YNAB "age your money" approach and it works especially well for shift workers because the spread is usually wider than salaried workers expect. The 2024 BLS data showed average weekly hours for RNs ranged from 32 to 50 across the workforce — your worst-paycheck month is the safe planning baseline.

Tag each paycheck deposit with a source category — Base Pay, Diff Night, Diff Weekend, OT, Holiday. Cash Compass shows the breakdown in the category chart. This matters because differential income is technically your trade for working harder shifts — if you're using diff income to cover normal monthly expenses, you've baked the worse shifts into your baseline. If you'd like to drop nights eventually, knowing exactly how much your budget depends on diff pay tells you what to cut first. The 2024 ANA Nursing Workforce study showed night-differential pay averaged $4.50/hour over base, adding about $7,500/year for a full-time night RN.

Cash Compass works offline and syncs via iCloud, so it doesn't care which state you're in. The real complication for travel nurses is multi-state taxes — you'll typically file in your tax-home state plus any state you worked in for more than 7-30 days depending on jurisdiction. Cash Compass doesn't do tax filing, but the CSV export lets you sort income and expenses by date so a tax preparer can allocate by state. Add categories like Stipend: Housing and Stipend: M&IE (Meals & Incidentals) so the non-taxable portions stay visible. The 2024 Vivian Health travel-nurse survey put average travel-contract gross pay at $2,200/week including taxable wages and non-taxable stipends — tracking the split is what makes year-end clean.

Tag them under a Career category — License, CE, Scrubs, Certifications. License renewals usually run $50-$200 every 2 years depending on state. CE requirements range from 20-30 hours every renewal cycle; quality CE courses run $100-$600. Specialty certifications (CCRN, PCCN, OCN) cost $250-$400 plus renewal fees. If you're a W-2 employee, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act suspended unreimbursed employee expense deductions through 2025, so most of this is no longer federally deductible — but some employers reimburse if you submit. If you're a 1099 contractor (per diem, travel via your own LLC), these are Schedule C deductions. Cash Compass tracks regardless; the CSV gives you the totals for whichever path applies.