As a recreational player are you just playing for fun and happy to pay for your entertainment?
You should never play more than you can afford to lose!
If you want to deposit and play say $10 a week and once a year enter a $200 live tournament,
and your household income can easily afford that instead of say visiting theatres, gyms, music festivals, model trains, flower arranging, or whatever, then that is fine.
However if you want to play to win then you need to keep score.
The way to keep score in poker is to set aside a bankroll.
Some players start at zero and play
freerolls to build up a bankroll.
Some players decide a certain amount of money they can afford to be their starting bankroll.
Some start casually and after a while have a big win or realise they have had enough winnings to accumulate a bankroll.
What normally happens next is people play with that money (often at too high stakes) until they lose it all and then moan about having lost their bankroll.
This is where bankroll management comes in.
There are enough threads and columns about this. So there is no point in going in to details here, but basically it just says only stake a small percentage at a time and being a percentage means that if the bankroll goes down the percentage will be a smaller amount and if the bankroll is growing the percentage then allows for experimenting with higher stakes. Managing the bankroll should in theory ensure there is always something to play with and enable it to be worked as hard as possible.
For the average recreational player just keeping an eye on the balance and ensuring it is trending upwards not going down is a good indication whether the performance and stakes are appropriate. If things are going the wrong way then lower the stakes.
The other thing you have to decide is how you want to define your bankroll. For instance some of it could be kept in your bank account.
You could have separate bankrolls for each online site and for live games or you could decide to view everything combined as a single bankroll.
These are personal decisions, there is no right or wrong answer.