Budget Planner

How to use this

Add a row for each category you spend on, put your intended amount in planned, and what you actually spent in actual. The summary tells you where the two diverge.

The value is not in the totals. It is in the individual rows, because almost nobody overspends evenly. Most budgets fail in one or two categories while the rest behave, and until you separate them you cannot see which.

Start with the categories already there, rename them to match your life, and delete the ones that do not apply. Six to twelve rows is usually the right level of detail. Fewer and you cannot see where the money went; more and you will not keep it up.

Planned versus actual is the whole point

A budget that only records intentions is a wish list. A budget that only records spending is a bank statement. The gap between them is the only part that tells you anything.

Three patterns to look for:

• Consistently over in one category. Your plan is wrong, not your behaviour. Raise the planned figure and take it from somewhere else
• Consistently under in one category. You have money allocated to something you do not actually do. Move it
• Wildly variable month to month. This is usually an irregular expense being treated as a monthly one

The first is the most common and the most misdiagnosed. If you plan 300 for food and spend 450 every single month, the honest response is to plan 450 and find the 150 elsewhere, not to resolve to try harder.

The category most budgets get wrong

Irregular expenses are what break otherwise sensible budgets. Insurance renewals, car servicing, road tax, holidays, birthdays, professional fees, replacing a laptop. None of these arrive monthly, so they do not appear in a monthly budget, and each one feels like an unforeseeable emergency when it lands.

They are not unforeseeable. They are annual, and they are predictable.

The fix is to add them as monthly rows at one twelfth of the annual cost. A 600 annual insurance premium becomes a 50 line item. Set that money aside and the renewal stops being a crisis.

Categories worth checking whether you have missed:

• Insurance renewals, across every policy
• Vehicle servicing, tyres, road tax
• Professional subscriptions and licences
• Gifts, birthdays, and holidays
• Replacing things that wear out: laptop, phone, mattress, appliances
• Medical and dental costs not covered by a plan
• Home maintenance

Adding these usually makes a budget look worse in month one and considerably more accurate from then on.

Essential versus discretionary

For a budget to be useful in a crisis, you need to know which rows are which. The figure that matters when income stops is not your total spending. It is what it costs to keep the household running with everything optional suspended.

That figure is what sizes an emergency fund, and it is normally well below take-home pay. Working it out here, honestly, is the most valuable single output of this tool. Building an emergency fund explains how many months of it you should hold.

The boundary is personal, and being honest about it matters more than getting it theoretically right.

What to do with the difference

If your actual total is under your planned total, the surplus is a decision, not a windfall. Left in the current account it will be absorbed by next month's spending, which is one of the most reliable findings in personal finance.

Give it a job before it arrives:

1. A starter emergency fund, if you do not have one
2. Your employer retirement match, if you are not capturing it in full
3. High-interest debt, where the return is guaranteed and equal to the rate. Our debt payoff calculator will order them
4. Everything else, once those are handled. Our debt or invest calculator compares the last two

If your actual total is over, the response is the same in reverse: the shortfall came from somewhere, usually savings or a card, and the row that caused it is visible above.

Why the percentage bars matter more than the totals

Each category shows what you spent as a proportion of what you planned. This is deliberately more prominent than the cash amounts, because proportions expose problems that totals hide.

Being 20 over on a 200 category and 20 over on a 2,000 category are the same in cash and completely different in kind. The first is a real signal; the second is a rounding error. A category running at 180% of plan is telling you something even when the amount is small, because it means your estimate for that category is not connected to reality.

Making it stick

Budgets fail from friction more than from arithmetic. What actually works:

• Do it monthly, not weekly. Most bills are monthly, and weekly reviews create noise
• Fill in actuals from your statement, not from memory. Memory systematically understates spending
• Use the same categories every month, so you can compare like with like
• Do not aim for zero variance. A budget that is 90% accurate and gets done beats a perfect one abandoned in March
• Review after the month ends, not during. Mid-month tracking creates anxiety without improving the outcome

A note on the 50/30/20 rule

You may have met the advice to put 50% of take-home pay to needs, 30% to wants and 20% to saving and debt repayment. It is a reasonable starting shape and a poor target.

The problem is housing. In an expensive city, essential costs alone can exceed 50% of take-home pay, and no amount of discipline changes that. Someone in that position is not failing a rule; the rule does not describe their situation.

Use it as a sanity check rather than a goal. If your essentials are far above half your income, the useful conclusions are about housing costs or income, not about your spending on coffee.

What this tool deliberately does not do

There is no account to create, no bank connection, and no data leaves your browser. That is a deliberate trade.

Budgeting apps that connect to your bank categorise transactions for you, which is genuinely convenient. The cost is handing your full transaction history to a company whose business model usually involves that data, and most of them are also lead generation businesses for financial products.

This tool asks you to type the figures in. That is more work, and it means the numbers pass through your own attention on the way, which is arguably where most of the value of budgeting actually lives. Nothing here is stored, transmitted, or sold, because there is nowhere for it to go.

The trade-off is real in both directions, and worth making deliberately rather than by default.

Two common questions

Should I budget from gross or net income? Net, always. Gross income includes tax you never see. A budget built on it will be wrong by whatever your deduction rate is, which for most people is enough to make the whole exercise misleading.

What about irregular income? If you are paid on commission, freelance, or seasonally, budget from your lowest typical month rather than your average. Months above that produce a surplus, which goes to the priorities above. This is uncomfortable and it is the only version that survives a bad quarter.

Sharing your figures

The Copy link button carries your inputs in the page address, so you can bookmark a month or send it to a partner. It is a link, not an account: nothing is saved on our side, and closing the tab without copying the link loses the figures.