Add up every category, see the percentages, and find what you've stopped noticing.
Total monthly spending
$4,890
$310 left from $5,200.
35%
14%
19%
$1,600
Your tracked spending is 94% of take-home pay. Housing, transport and food together account for $3,585 — 69% of income and 73% of everything you spend. Your single largest line is rent / mortgage at $1,600.
$1,000 across groceries and dining is above the 10–12% most budgets target. Food is the highest-variance category in almost every household — the gap between careful and careless is routinely $300–500 a month, and it's the easiest large category to change without feeling deprived.
A single month is never representative — it either misses the annual insurance premium and the car repair, or it happens to include both. Averaging three months gives you numbers you can actually plan against, and usually reveals $200–400 a month of irregular spending that no monthly view captures.
Knowing what you spend is step one. The budget optimizer compares every category against benchmarks for your income and tells you which one to attack first — sorted by dollars rather than by how egregious the percentage looks.
Find your spending leaksWorked scenarios with the full analysis, so you can see how the numbers move before entering your own.
A balanced budget with modest room left over and food running slightly high.
Total monthly spending
$4,890
Your tracked spending is 94% of take-home pay. Housing, transport and food together account for $3,585 — 69% of income and 73% of everything you spend. Your single largest line is rent / mortgage at $1,600.
$1,000 across groceries and dining is above the 10–12% most budgets target. Food is the highest-variance category in almost every household — the gap between careful and careless is routinely $300–500 a month, and it's the easiest large category to change without feeling deprived.
A single month is never representative — it either misses the annual insurance premium and the car repair, or it happens to include both. Averaging three months gives you numbers you can actually plan against, and usually reveals $200–400 a month of irregular spending that no monthly view captures.
Expenses exceed income — the pattern that grows a card balance every month.
Total monthly spending
$5,140
Your tracked spending is 125% of take-home pay. Housing, transport and food together account for $3,775 — 92% of income and 73% of everything you spend. Your single largest line is rent / mortgage at $1,550.
Spending $1,040 more than you earn means the gap is being covered by savings or credit each month. On a credit card at 24% that becomes $15,475 of debt within a year. This is the one problem that has to be fixed before any other optimization matters.
$1,100 across groceries and dining is above the 10–12% most budgets target. Food is the highest-variance category in almost every household — the gap between careful and careless is routinely $300–500 a month, and it's the easiest large category to change without feeling deprived.
Low fixed costs leaving substantial surplus to direct at goals.
Total monthly spending
$3,255
Your tracked spending is 48% of take-home pay. Housing, transport and food together account for $2,605 — 38% of income and 80% of everything you spend. Your single largest line is rent / mortgage at $1,500.
A single month is never representative — it either misses the annual insurance premium and the car repair, or it happens to include both. Averaging three months gives you numbers you can actually plan against, and usually reveals $200–400 a month of irregular spending that no monthly view captures.
Knowing what you spend is step one. The budget optimizer compares every category against benchmarks for your income and tells you which one to attack first — sorted by dollars rather than by how egregious the percentage looks.
Find your spending leaksA budget is a plan for money you haven't spent yet. Tracking is a record of money you have. Most people who fail at budgeting fail because their plan was built on guesses rather than measurements — the categories were wrong from day one, so the plan broke in week two.
Track first, for three months, then budget. The numbers you discover are almost always different from the numbers you'd have estimated, particularly for food, subscriptions and the amorphous 'everything else' category that quietly absorbs several hundred dollars a month in most households.
Housing, transportation and food account for 60–70% of most household budgets. A 10% improvement across those three is worth more than eliminating every discretionary purchase, and it requires far less ongoing willpower because the changes are structural rather than behavioural.
Renegotiating a lease, refinancing or downsizing a car, and building a genuine meal plan are three decisions that keep paying every month without further effort. Watching every coffee is a decision you have to make again every day. Structural changes beat vigilance.
Any single month is unrepresentative. Average three.
Insurance, gifts and repairs total $3,000–6,000 a year and appear in no monthly view.
Groceries, delivery, restaurants and work lunches hide the real total. Add them up.
Measurement isn't change. Pick one category and make a structural change to it.
Sort by dollars. A 5% cut to housing beats a 50% cut to subscriptions.
Export three months of transactions from your bank and card accounts, sort them into categories, and average. Three months matters — a single month either misses annual costs like insurance premiums and car repairs, or happens to include several at once. Enter the averages here to see the percentages.
As reference points: housing 30%, transportation 15%, food 10–12%, insurance and healthcare 6%, subscriptions 2%, shopping 5%. These are diagnostics rather than rules — in expensive metros housing is often unavoidably higher, and the correct response is compressing discretionary categories rather than savings.
Usually irregular annual costs that never appear in a monthly view — insurance premiums, car repairs, gifts, medical deductibles and travel typically total $3,000–6,000 a year. Divide your annual total by twelve and treat it as a monthly bill in a separate account.
No. A bank export and a spreadsheet does the same job, and forces you to actually look at each transaction rather than trusting an automatic category. Apps help with consistency — use whichever you'll keep doing for three months.
Attack housing, transportation and food first — they're 60–70% of most budgets. Renegotiating rent, refinancing or downsizing a car, and meal planning each move hundreds of dollars a month permanently. Cancelling subscriptions is worth doing but moves tens, not hundreds.
The next calculations that usually follow this one.
Compares every category against real benchmarks and shows exactly where you're overspending.
Built on take-home pay, with the annual costs that break most monthly budgets.
Income in, obligations out, and the number that decides whether you're building or slipping.
The annual total, the per-use cost, and what cancelling would be worth if invested.
Sized on essential expenses and your actual risk profile — not a generic three-to-six months.
Guides that explain the decisions behind these numbers.
How to build a budget on take-home pay using the 50/30/20 framework, account for irregular annual costs, and fix the categories that actually matter.
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