Enter what comes in and what goes out, on whatever cycle suits you, and this normalises everything and shows what is left.
Nothing is compared against a spending benchmark and nothing is judged. The arithmetic runs in your browser and no figure leaves it.
Puts income and every expense on one cycle and shows what is left: surplus a week, a month and a year, the share of income going to housing, and where the money actually goes.
How often you are paid
A fortnight is two weeks, so a year holds twenty-six of them rather than twenty-four. Treating fortnightly pay as twice-monthly loses two pays a year, and it is the most common error in a hand-built budget.
How you are entering expenses
Pick one cycle and convert everything to it before entering. Mixing cycles inside the categories is the other way this goes wrong.
Discretionary
Eating out, subscriptions, hobbies, travel and gifts. The category people underestimate most, and the one where a surplus is usually found.
The surplus is shown weekly, monthly and annually because each answers a different question. The weekly figure is what you feel; the annual figure is what you can plan with.
Housing as a share of income is the line most worth watching over time. It is the number that decides how much room everything else has, and it moves when you move, not gradually.
A negative surplus is worth sitting with rather than immediately re-entering smaller expense figures. It means the year as entered does not balance, and the useful question is which category is wrong.
Every figure below is computed by the same calculator on this page, from the inputs described. Nothing here is typed in by hand, so an example cannot disagree with the tool.
Note that annual income is twenty-six pays, not twenty-four. If you have ever wondered why your budget balanced on paper and not in practice, this is usually where the two pays went.
Housing as a share of income is the line that moves, and it moves further than the rent rise alone suggests because everything else stayed the same.
Every amount is multiplied by the number of times its cycle occurs in a year — fifty-two weekly, twenty-six fortnightly, twelve monthly, four quarterly, one annually — which puts income and expenses on the same footing before anything is subtracted.
Shares are computed against annual income, so a quarterly bill and a weekly one contribute in proportion to what they actually cost over a year rather than in proportion to their face value.
Steady income
Variable, seasonal or commission income does not fit a single figure. Enter a conservative one and treat the surplus as a floor.
Nothing irregular
Car registration, insurance excesses, school levies and the dentist all arrive at once and none of them is monthly. A budget that only counts regular costs always looks healthier than the year turns out to be.
After-tax figures throughout
The income asked for is take-home pay. Entering a gross salary will overstate the surplus by the whole tax bill.
It is a snapshot
One month of figures is not a year of behaviour. Budgets built from a good month are the ones that fail.
Nothing is saved
Nothing you enter is stored, sent or remembered. Come back and you will start from the defaults again — which is the trade for it never being anywhere but your browser.
It does not tell you what is normal
No category is compared to an average. What a household should spend is not a number a calculator can supply.
Solves for the loan a set of assumptions you control will support — income, declared expenses, commitments, an assessment buffer and a surplus you want to keep.
Works out how long a savings target takes to reach at your current rate of saving.
Works out how long a card balance takes to clear at a fixed monthly repayment, and what the interest costs.
This calculator can be embedded on a business website, branded to match it, with a call to action that sends the enquiry to that business rather than collecting anything here.