<prompt> Human: After expenses and savings, what percentage of your income do you consider disposable? My wife and I are careful budgeters but were each taking 714 total of our monthly take-home pay for our allowance and Im trying to figure out if this is high or low.  <response>: Absolutely none.I dont consider the dollar amount to be negligible in advance; earning 100 and saying I can spend 5 on anything I want! and buying a cheap 5 toy that breaks in an hour is idiocy that comes as a direct result from trying to pre-manage your finances.I have money that isnt already set to be used for important and mandatory things like bills and loan payments. In reality, I could spend every cent of it or none, but I dont tell myself a certain percentage is okay to spend.To put it in perspective, I stopped eating lunch because it cost nearly 5 a day unless I packed and I hated packing my lunch. I just started eating dinner earlier when I got home and bought a box of cereal or bag of chips every once in a while to snack on at work. 5 is negligible, and it is logical to eat lunch throughout the week, but thats 30 over a week and over 100 a month. I can nearly buy groceries for a month in exchange for not eating one meal a day.The same goes for things far more non-essential. If you go to get gas and like to stop in and get an Arnold Palmer 1 and a bag of chips 3.29 or so? as a treat for yourself, thats only going to be somewhere between 4 and 5, and could be as few as 1 to 5 times a month; even at the high end its only 25 a month and still pretty cheap. Well, thats 300 a year, and having an extra 3,000 after ten years means that you can replace your washer and dryer.Dont set aside a static amount for an allowance unless youre willing to lose exactly that much money every year. If you guys make about 50k a year together, thats 3500 in disposable income. You could go out to eat 70 times or so, or maybe 40 or 50 movies with snacks, whatever, but heres the thing:You can be happy without doing that stuff so much, and when you set aside that much money youre willing to legitimize it.Want to see the new Batman movie? Youll go and see it and be able to justify the expense. You know the movie is coming out, you know you both want to see it, youll make it work.Your wife sees a preview for a movie and says I feel like going out, you want to see that? because she knows you have money set aside for doing things like that. You say Sure, whatever. Neither of you care about the movie, but you go and dont bat an eye because its money just for these occasions.If you automate your money management by simply saying this much is play money, youll spend all that play money. Have you ever had a time in your life where you had to schedule or manage a limited resource and didnt end up finishing it off because it was okay? A bag of popcorn in a theater just keeps getting munched on well past the time youre hungry, the drink in the restaurant keeps getting sipped, the bag of fries keeps getting eaten, etc., etc.Dont let your finances be automatically managed. Just ask yourself each time can we afford this? Is this actually worth the money? and micro manage it. If you do, youre able to save lots of money and spend on things of actual value.Sooner than you think, instead of having waste-away money youll find you have a bunch of money for a vacation or a musical instrument or something else more awesome.You 