Don’t let money slip through your fingers anymore. Use this free tool to define your disposable income and maximize your savings starting today.
💰 1. My Income
🏠 2. Housing & Fixed Costs
🛒 3. Daily Life & Family
🎉 4. Leisure & Personal
📉 5. My Debts (Liabilities)
📈 6. My Savings & Investment (Assets)
Financial Summary
Remaining Cash (Unallocated) :
This budget calculator was designed with a specific philosophy: prioritize investing. Your goal is not just to balance your “Income” and “Expenses” columns, but to maximize the most important line of this tool, displayed at the very top: your Savings Rate.
This guide explains how to interpret your results to transform passive spending into active capital.
How to calculate your expenses accurately?
To get an accurate result, you must use real numbers. Don’t do mental math. Take your bank statements or check your online account.
You must fill in two types of expenses:
- Fixed costs (Section 2) : These are the bills that are the same each month (rent, internet box, plans). They are easy to find.
- Variable costs (Section 3) : These are expenses that change all the time (groceries, fuel, outings). It’s often here that mistakes are made.
The monthly averaging rule: Some expenses are paid only once a year (insurance, property tax, holidays). Don’t put 0 € in the box this month.
- Add up the total amount for the year.
- Divide that amount by 12.
- Enter this result into the calculator.
It’s the only way to have a reliable budget all year round.
How to analyze the chart of your budget calculator?
This chart does not go into detail for each receipt. It gives you an overview by major categories (Housing, Daily life, Investment…).
It is used to visualize the balance of your budget at a glance
- Visual alert: Compare the size of the ‘Debts’ slice (Section 5) with that of the ‘Savings & Investment’ slice (Section 6). If your debts occupy more space than your investments, your budget is looking to the past.
- Imbalances: If the ‘Housing & Fixed Costs’ (Section 2) section exceeds half of the circle, your room for maneuver is too small.
Your goal is simple: you must reduce the size of the ‘Daily Life’ and ‘Leisure’ sections to mechanically grow the ‘Savings‘ section.
Your Savings Rate: The only number that really matters
Look at the very top of the budget calculator. Do you see the percentage displayed large? That’s your Savings Rate. It’s the most important indicator on this page, far more than your net salary.
This number represents your speed of wealth accumulation. The higher it is, the faster you buy your financial freedom.
Here’s how to situate your result :
- 0% Danger Zone. You are working only to pay your bills. You have no security.
- 10% The Bare Minimum. It’s a good start, but it will only be enough to fund an emergency fund.
- 30% and above The Royal Road. You are starting to invest seriously. It’s the pace needed to aim for financial independence.
How to increase your investment capacity?
The diagnosis is clear. To change the situation, you must transfer amounts from the ‘Costs’ sections to the ‘Investment’ section. To achieve this, you should not rely on willpower, but on automated systems.
The golden rule: “Pay yourself first”
This is the most powerful concept in personal finance. We all have a natural tendency to spend the entirety of the money available in our current account. If you wait until the end of the month to save what is left, often nothing will remain.
The solution is to reverse the process. As soon as you receive your salary, you must immediately transfer a defined amount to another account. It’s the principle of paying yourself first.
The goal is to psychologically train yourself to live with a lower disposable balance. Your brain will naturally adapt to this new balance for your daily expenses.
Set up an automatic transfer scheduled for the day after payday:
- Secure: Initially, this money should fill your emergency savings (your safety cushion in case of hardship).
- Invest: Once this emergency fund is built, don’t keep increasing it unnecessarily. Redirect the same transfer to your investment vehicles (stocks, crowdlending , crypto) to build your wealth.
Optimization: Hunt for fixed costs
Once the mechanism is in place, you need to feed it. The fastest method to free up cash is not to deprive yourself, but to optimize your fixed costs.
Loyalty doesn’t pay. Insurers and energy suppliers almost systematically offer better deals to new customers than to their loyal customers. If you haven’t changed contracts in two years, you’re losing money.
Take the time, once a year, to review these four key items:
- Insurance: Car and home insurance are often overpriced. Play providers against each other for the same coverage.
- Phone and Internet: Mobile plans keep dropping. Are you still paying €20 for a plan when €10 options exist?
- Energy: Compare kWh rates for electricity and gas.
- Bank Fees: If your bank still charges you for a debit card or account maintenance fees, it’s time to switch to a free online bank.
The goal is not to recover €50 to spend on leisure, but to add that €50 to your automatic investment transfer. Over 10 or 15 years, this simple optimization turns into a considerable capital thanks to compound interest.
Budget Management FAQ
It’s a classic method that suggests allocating your salary as follows: 50% for essentials, 30% for wants, and 20% for savings. However, don’t get stuck on these numbers. The important thing is to take action, regardless of the starting percentage. Often, when you start investing and see your first gains, you enjoy it. You end up naturally increasing your saving capacity without forcing yourself, simply because you want to see your assets grow faster.
With a tight budget, the margin for error is small. The top priority is tracking fixed costs (insurance, subscriptions). Apply the “pay yourself first” method even if it’s only €20 or €30. It’s the habit of saving that matters more than the amount.
Put it in Section 2 (Housing & Fixed Costs). Even if you are buying your primary residence (which is a form of asset), it is a mandatory monthly cash outflow that constrains your cash flow. It must therefore be counted as a fixed cost.
To monitor your daily spending, your bank’s app is usually sufficient. To make your monthly assessment and define your strategy, use the budget calculator at the top of this page. It has a “Print / Save PDF” feature. I recommend saving your report each month and filing it. This will allow you to compare the evolution of your savings rate month to month.
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