Budget Calculator
$0.00 left over each month
How This Budget Calculator Works
This calculator totals your monthly income and sorts your expenses into three buckets: needs (housing, transportation, food, debt payments, and insurance), wants (discretionary spending like dining out and entertainment), and savings or investing contributions. What's left after all categories are subtracted is your monthly surplus — or, if negative, the gap you're overspending by.
The 50/30/20 Guideline
A widely used rule of thumb suggests aiming for roughly 50% of take-home pay on needs, 30% on wants, and 20% toward savings and debt payoff beyond minimums. This calculator checks your actual percentages against that guideline as a sanity check, not a strict rule — someone with high rent in an expensive city or a temporarily high debt load will naturally skew those numbers, and that's fine as long as you understand why.
If You're Running a Deficit
A negative leftover amount means your current spending exceeds your income and something has to give, either by cutting discretionary costs or increasing income. If a big share of your "needs" is actually debt payments, the debt payoff calculator can help you find a faster route out. If you're building your savings line item from scratch, the savings calculator can show how small monthly contributions grow over time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What counts as a "need" versus a "want" in this calculator?
Needs are essential, recurring costs you can't easily avoid: housing and utilities, transportation, food and groceries, minimum debt payments, and insurance/healthcare. Wants are discretionary spending like dining out, entertainment, subscriptions, and shopping. The line isn't always crisp — for example, some debt payments (like a car loan on a needed vehicle) are needs while other discretionary charges on a credit card are really wants — so feel free to adjust which category you put an expense in based on your own situation.
What if my needs are already above 50% of my income?
That's common in high cost-of-living areas or with above-average debt loads, and it doesn't necessarily mean you're doing something wrong. Use it as a signal to look for the biggest lever available — usually housing or debt payments — rather than trying to force every category to hit the 50/30/20 targets exactly. If debt is the main driver, running the numbers through a dedicated debt payoff plan can show how quickly that percentage can come down.