Budgeting calculators
The 50/30/20 rule, applied to your actual numbers
What does 50/30/20 look like on your income — and how close are you?
Enter your take-home income and what you actually spend on needs and wants. You get the rule's rupee targets for each bucket — and, more usefully, where your own split stands against them. Whatever is left after needs and wants is your real savings rate, whether or not you have been calling it that.
Set your income and spending above to see your split against the rule.
Where your money goes today
Your actual split. If the third segment is thin or missing, that is the point the rule exists to make.
Where 50/30/20 would put it
The two projections assume a 12% annual return, roughly the long-run average of Indian equity indices. That is an assumption, not a promise — real decades come in above and below it.
Alternative splits on your income
The ratio is a starting point, not scripture. High rent argues for 60/20/20 or even 70/10/20 — the discipline worth keeping is the savings line, not the exact split of what remains.
Educational only. These are projections from the numbers you entered — not advice, a quote, or a prediction. Real returns vary, and tax treatment differs by option and changes over time. The long-run projections assume the return shown beside them, which is an assumption about markets, not a promise from anyone. Klera never lends or moves money.
Why a rule this crude works
50/30/20 — half your take-home for needs, thirty percent for wants, twenty for savings — was popularised by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi in All Your Worth, and its virtue is exactly what it gets criticised for: it is crude. It does not ask you to categorise four hundred transactions or forecast next month's electricity bill. It asks three questions a person can answer from memory, and it makes one demand — that a fifth of your income goes to your future before your present has finished spending.
That makes it a triage device, not an optimum. Nobody's ideal budget is exactly 50/30/20; the ratios are round numbers chosen to be memorable. What the rule actually does is surface the one figure most people have never computed: what is genuinely left after needs and wants. Enter your real spending above and the calculator computes it — for a lot of people, seeing "you save 6%" in plain text is worth more than any optimised plan they would not follow.
Where the rule breaks
It breaks in three honest places. The first is expensive cities, where rent alone can take forty percent of a decent income and the needs bucket is blown before groceries. The answer there is not to give up but to renegotiate the ratio — 60/20/20 keeps the savings line intact and takes the squeeze out of wants, which is uncomfortable but survivable. The table above shows those variants on your income.
The second is low incomes, where needs can genuinely be eighty or ninety percent of take-home and no rearrangement fixes the arithmetic. A budgeting ratio cannot conjure a surplus that does not exist; at that point the useful work is on the income side, and the rule's only honest contribution is to say so rather than imply a discipline problem.
The third is high earners, for whom the rule is too generous. If you take home several lakh a month, thirty percent for wants is an enormous licence and twenty for savings is an underachievement — needs do not scale with income, so the surplus should go disproportionately to the last bucket. 50/20/30, with savings as the biggest ratio, is a better shape; past a point, the right frame stops being percentages at all.
50/30/20, zero-based, or envelopes?
Zero-based budgeting is the opposite temperament: every rupee of income gets a named job before the month starts, and income minus assignments equals zero. It is more precise and more work — the right tool when money is tight enough that "roughly 30% for wants" is not an acceptable answer, and overkill when it is. Many people run zero-based for a few tight months and relax back to a ratio when the pressure lifts; both are legitimate.
Envelope budgeting is about enforcement rather than planning: each category gets a fixed pot, and when the pot is empty the spending stops — no borrowing from next month. It pairs naturally with either of the others, because a ratio tells you how big the envelopes should be but nothing about what happens on the 19th when one runs dry.
50/30/20 is the low-maintenance member of the family. It trades precision for the one property budgets actually fail on — being followed in month four. If you have never budgeted, start here; if the ratio keeps failing you in the same place every month, that is the signal to move to something stricter, not proof that budgeting does not work.
What the 20% is actually for
The rule is silent on where the fifth goes, which is a gap worth filling. The boring, correct order: an emergency fund first — several months of the needs figure the calculator just showed you, somewhere dull and reachable — then investing for the goals that are years away. The projections above show why the second half matters: the same monthly amount roughly held in cash versus compounded for twenty years are different orders of magnitude.
And "20% of income" is a ratio, not a plan. A plan has a target and a date. The goal SIP calculator inverts the question — given what you are saving for, what monthly amount does it actually take, with inflation counted — and the step-up SIP calculator shows what happens when the savings line rises with your income instead of staying flat, which is how 20% quietly becomes 25%.
A calculator answers once — a budget has to keep answering
This page tells you where you stand today. The rule only pays off if something checks the split next month too, when the numbers have drifted and nobody is looking. That is an app's job, not a web page's.
Klera's version of it is bucket budgets: one monthly total split across four buckets — Needs, Wants, Investments and Learning — with style presets and overspend alerts, so a bucket running hot tells you mid-month rather than in the post-mortem. That is honestly not identical to 50/30/20: the rule has three buckets, Klera has four, with the rule's savings fifth roughly corresponding to Investments and Learning together. Set Needs to half and Wants to 30% and you get the rule's discipline with slightly finer detail on where the last fifth goes. It runs offline on your phone, with no account and no server that ever sees a transaction — the same footing as this calculator, which computed everything in your browser and uploaded nothing.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a need and what counts as a want?
A need is a payment you cannot skip next month without real consequences: rent, groceries, utilities, the commute, insurance premiums, minimum payments on existing debt. A want is everything you could stop tomorrow, however unpleasant — eating out, subscriptions, shopping, travel. The honest test is not whether something feels essential but what happens if you cut it: a cancelled streaming plan is annoying; skipped rent is a crisis. Most people file too much under needs. The phone upgrade on EMI is a want, however it is financed.
Is the 50/30/20 rule based on gross or take-home income?
Take-home. The rule splits what actually lands in your account after tax and deductions, because that is the money you can direct. Apply it to gross salary and every target inflates — needs look comfortably under 50% while the real savings rate quietly falls short. If part of your pay is already going into a retirement scheme before it reaches you, it is fair to count that toward the 20%.
What if rent alone is half my income?
Then 50/30/20, as written, is not achievable for you right now — and pretending otherwise helps nobody. This is normal in expensive cities, not a personal failing. The useful adaptation is to protect the savings line and squeeze wants instead: 60/20/20, or 70/10/20 if rent truly dominates. The table in the calculator shows both on your income. The ratio is negotiable; abandoning the 20% because the 50% is impossible is the mistake to avoid.
Is saving 20% enough?
It depends what the 20% has to do and how long it has to do it. As a floor for someone starting in their twenties, it is genuinely good — decades of compounding do a lot of the work. For a late starter, someone without employer retirement contributions, or anyone with a large goal on a short clock, it is not. The right check is to run the number against an actual goal rather than trust the ratio: the goal SIP calculator on this site does exactly that, inflation included.
Does the 20% include my EMI payments?
Split them. The minimum EMI on an existing loan is a need — you cannot skip it, so it belongs in the 50%. Anything you pay beyond the minimum, such as prepaying a loan faster than the schedule requires, counts toward the 20%, because it builds your net worth exactly the way saving does. This follows the rule as originally framed: the last bucket is savings plus debt repayment beyond minimums.
Where do investments fit in the 50/30/20 rule?
Inside the 20% — the rule does not distinguish between a savings account, a SIP, or extra loan prepayment. It only insists that a fifth of your income goes toward your future rather than your present. The sensible ordering within that fifth is an emergency fund first (a few months of the needs number the calculator just showed you), then investing for goals further out, where higher-return assets have time to work.
Is there an app that applies 50/30/20 automatically?
Klera comes close, with one honest difference. Its budgeting is bucket budgets: one monthly total split across four buckets — Needs, Wants, Investments and Learning — with style presets and overspend alerts, tracked as you log spending. That is four buckets to the rule’s three: what 50/30/20 calls savings roughly maps to Klera’s Investments and Learning together, so it is a mapping, not an exact match. Set Needs at half and Wants at 30% and you get the rule’s behaviour with slightly finer detail on the last fifth. Free, offline, on Android, no sign-up.