Enter your take-home (after-tax) pay and how often you’re paid. The 50/30/20 rule puts half towards needs, 30% towards wants and 20% towards savings and paying off debt. Pick a different split, or set your own, if that suits your situation better.
| Weekly | Fortnightly | Monthly | Yearly |
|---|
Enter what you actually spend per pay period to see where you’re over or under.
| Target | Actual | Difference |
|---|
The 50/30/20 rule, popularised by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi in All Your Worth, splits after-tax income three ways:
Needs (50%): things you must pay: rent or mortgage, power, water, insurance, groceries, transport to work, minimum debt repayments, childcare.
Wants (30%): things you could live without: eating out, takeaways, streaming, hobbies, holidays, upgrades.
Savings & debt (20%): emergency fund, retirement or KiwiSaver top-ups, investments, and repayments above the minimum.
On a fortnightly take-home pay of 1,500 that’s 750 for needs, 450 for wants and 300 for savings: 19,500, 11,700 and 7,800 over a year. A year has 26 fortnights and 52 weeks, so monthly figures are the yearly total ÷ 12, not fortnightly × 2.
A simple budgeting guideline: spend about 50% of your after-tax income on needs, 30% on wants, and put 20% towards savings and paying off debt faster.
Take-home pay: what actually lands in your bank account after tax, and after any retirement contributions deducted by your employer, such as KiwiSaver or a 401(k). Those deductions already count towards saving.
That’s common with high rents. Try 60/20/20 or 70/20/10, keep the savings slice as high as you can, and look for the biggest needs costs that could come down over time, like rent, power plans or insurance.
Minimum repayments are needs, because you have to pay them. Anything above the minimum goes in savings & debt, since it improves your finances the same way saving does.
Convert via the yearly figure: weekly × 52, fortnightly × 26, monthly × 12. Then divide by the period you want. A month is about 4.33 weeks, not 4.
