Short version. MoneyBadger's defaults come from peer-reviewed research and publicly-sourced data, not from a proprietary black box. Every recommendation can be traced back to a source.
Essential-worker pay does not behave like a salary. So we don't budget the blended total.
Base, longevity, differentials that arrive every cycle. Your monthly life is built on this, split needs / wants / future-you, tuned per profession.
Overtime, details, drill pay. Never budgeted into lifestyle, routed to the waterfall, so a slow month never breaks the plan.
Emergency reserve, then high-interest debt, then future-you. A heavy-overtime month builds the cushion instead of vanishing.
The engineering behind the model is ours: the vision-language extraction, two-axis classification, and reconciliation architecture that reads a paystub into this plan is the subject of U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 64/086,646, filed June 9, 2026. Patent pending.
The full per-profession splits, and the citations behind each one, live in the calculator.