Budget Planner
Put every dollar in one place — what comes in, what goes out — and see whether you're finishing the month ahead or behind. Enter your figures at whatever frequency suits you and we'll show your monthly surplus, your savings rate, and where your spending really goes.
Updated 26 July 2026 · general guidance. Runs entirely in your browser on your own numbers — nothing is sent anywhere or stored.
| Total income (monthly) | $0 |
| Total expenses (monthly) | $0 |
| Savings rate | 0% |
A snapshot based on the figures you enter — everything is normalised to a monthly amount. This is general information, not financial advice.
How a Budget Actually Works
A budget is just two totals held up against each other: money in, money out. Add up everything you earn in a month, add up everything you spend, and the gap between them is the only number that really matters. A positive gap is a surplus — money you get to keep, save or invest. A negative gap is a deficit, and it means something has to give, either the income side or the spending side.
The catch is that money arrives and leaves on different clocks. You might be paid fortnightly, pay rent monthly, buy groceries weekly and settle insurance once a year. To compare them honestly you have to put everything on the same timeline. This planner does that for you: pick a frequency, type in the figures as you actually experience them, and every line is converted to a monthly amount behind the scenes before the sums are done.
How It's Calculated — a Worked Example
Say your household take-home pay is $6,000 a month. Against that you spend $1,900 on housing, $300 on utilities, $800 on groceries, $450 on transport and fuel, $250 on insurance, $150 on health, $400 on debt repayments, $250 on subscriptions and entertainment, and $300 on everything else. Those expenses add up to $4,800. Your budget looks like this:
$6,000 income − $4,800 expenses = $1,200 surplus
Your savings rate is that surplus divided by your income — $1,200 ÷ $6,000 = 20%. Type those same figures into the planner above (leave the toggle on Monthly) and you'll get the same $1,200 surplus and 20% savings rate, along with a breakdown showing housing is about 40% of your spending and groceries around 17%. A 20% savings rate lands you right on the savings target of the popular 50/30/20 rule — more on that below.
Converting Between Frequencies
The one place budgets quietly go wrong is turning weekly or fortnightly amounts into monthly ones. It's tempting to multiply a weekly figure by four, but there are about 4.33 weeks in an average month, not four. The planner uses the honest conversion: weekly figures are multiplied by 52 and divided by 12, and fortnightly figures are multiplied by 26 and divided by 12. So $1,000 paid fortnightly is about $2,167 a month, and skipping that step would understate both your income and your bills by roughly 8%.
The 50/30/20 Rule
Once you know your surplus, the natural next question is whether your spending mix is sensible. The best-known yardstick is the 50/30/20 rule — a popular budgeting rule of thumb (not an official statistic) that splits your after-tax income into three buckets. It won't fit everyone, but it's a quick sense-check on where the money is going.
| Bucket | Guideline share | What goes in it |
|---|---|---|
| Needs | ~50% | Housing, utilities, groceries, transport, insurance, health, minimum debt repayments |
| Wants | ~30% | Subscriptions, entertainment, dining out, hobbies, holidays, the discretionary part of "everything else" |
| Savings | ~20% | Your surplus — cash savings, investments, and any extra debt repayments above the minimum |
In our worked example, the $1,200 surplus is a 20% savings rate — bang on the savings bucket. If your own savings rate comes in below 20%, the rule points you at the two levers that move it: trim the "wants" bucket, or bring down a large "needs" line like housing or transport. If you're already above 20%, you're ahead of the guideline and can put the extra toward a specific goal.
Turning a Surplus Into a Plan
A surplus is only useful once it has a job. The first job is usually a buffer: a few months of expenses set aside so a surprise bill doesn't undo your progress or push you into debt. The emergency fund calculator sizes that cushion from the very expense total you've just worked out here. Once the buffer is in place, point the surplus at a named target — a house deposit, a car, a trip — and the savings goal calculator tells you how long it'll take at your current savings rate.
If a chunk of your expenses is debt repayments, some of that surplus is often best aimed at the debts themselves. Clearing high-interest credit-card and personal-loan balances lifts your net worth dollar-for-dollar, and the debt avalanche vs snowball calculator maps the quickest order to knock them over. And when you want to see how a year of consistent surpluses is actually building your wealth, the net worth calculator ties the whole picture together — a budget shows the flow, net worth shows the level.
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