BUDGET CALCULATOR
Turn your take-home pay into a plan.
Start from a preset split below, then drag the sliders until it fits your life. Every dollar has to come from somewhere, so moving one slider up always means finding room by moving another down.
Show as
The big three
Needs, wants, and savings
Drag a bucket down to free up room, then drag another one up to claim it. There's no moving money that isn't there.
On every slider below: the pale stretch past the handle is room you can claim right now; gray means something else has to move first. You can also type a dollar amount directly, and it'll settle at the most it can take if you type more than that.
For reference
Popular rules of thumb
A few other commonly-cited affordability guidelines, for context. This page doesn't calculate against these directly; they're the two rules the note below compares this tool's own defaults to, plus one more that comes up in the same conversations.
The default 25/9/9/4/2/1 (Needs), 9/9/3/6/3 (Wants), and 5/8/4/3 (Savings) split under the Balanced (50/30/20)
starting point is drawn from commonly-cited 50/30/20 guidance, not a precise prescription. Every slider is
meant to be dragged. Switching to one of the other two starting points keeps each subcategory's share of ITS
OWN bucket the same, just rescaled to that plan's bucket-level split. One thing worth knowing: all of these
percentages are of your monthly take-home (net) pay, not your gross pay, except the "Aggressive savings"
preset, which is adapted from a rule stated as a percentage of gross pay (see the preset's own description for
why). That gross/net distinction also applies to the two rules of thumb in the box above that sound similar to
this tool's own defaults: the "30% housing rule" and the "20/4/10 rule" for car affordability are both usually
expressed as a percentage of gross income, so if you've heard those numbers elsewhere, this tool's dollar
amounts will come out a bit lower for the same percentage, since take-home is always less than gross.
The "on track / running high / below target" feedback compares your current numbers against whichever starting
point is selected. Only one piece of it is backed by an outside source: NerdWallet notes that a short-term
Needs overage is normal, and only a persistent one is worth addressing, so a small Needs overage reads as "a
bit above target," not a warning. The exact percentage-point cutoffs used to sort "on track" from "a bit off"
from "notably off" are this tool's own reasonable call, since no source gives hard numeric ranges for this.
Spending less than target on Needs or Wants, or saving more than target, is never flagged: no source treats
doing better than the target as a problem.