Pillar 01 · Money
Free UK
Budget Planner
A free budget planner for UK households, built on 70/8/10/10/2 rather than 50/30/20. A budget should reflect the situation you are actually in — and if you are carrying debt with no buffer behind you, a rule that hands 30% to lifestyle spending was written for somebody else.
What comes in
Take-home, not gross. Not sure what that is? The Same-Day Skim Calendar works it out from your salary.
Needs — 70%
The word is needs. A car payment may be necessary; a more expensive car than you need is partly a lifestyle decision sitting in the wrong bucket. "I need £2,500 a month" and "my current lifestyle costs £2,500 a month" are not the same sentence.
Wants — 8%
Not zero. Deliberate. The point is not to stop spending on things you like, it is to make sure you are choosing to — which is the same idea as the 48-hour holding zone.
Debt — 10%
Borrowed from the 20% you pay yourself, not found at the end of the month. Minimums on everything, then the rest at one target debt. The Debt Calculator will date the end of it.
Pay yourself — 10%
This bucket is really 20%, and the reason is simple enough: I am not working for less money than I hand to the taxman. That would be insane. Ten of that twenty is currently going out as debt repayment — because I created the debt, so I pay it back — which is why clearing it does not free the money up for something new. It just comes home. Without a buffer a car repair becomes a card balance; with one it stays a car repair. Work out the target with the Emergency Fund Planner.
Investing in yourself — 2%
Not necessarily stocks and shares. A book, a course, a seminar, a tool that makes you better at something — that is all investment. Small enough that it does not derail the debt or the buffer, present enough that you are not waiting for some mythical moment when everything is sorted before you start. Two percent of an ordinary month buys a book most months and a course a few times a year, which is a great deal more than nothing.
Left to assign
Money in, minus every job you have given it
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Against the framework
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The percentages are not meant to last forever. The debt allocation exists to destroy itself, and the 10% it uses was never really its own — it was taken from what you pay yourself. So when the debt goes, the money does not get reallocated to something new. It goes back where it came from, and 70/8/10/10/2 becomes 70/8/20/2.
What happens after the buffer is full is the next stage, and it is not set here yet — that one is a decision, not a calculation.
Five accounts, and the order they go in
Each bucket is its own account. Not a column in a spreadsheet — a real account, with the money moved on payday. A bucket in a spreadsheet is a suggestion. A bucket with its own sort code is a fact.
Unspent money stays where it is. If the wants allowance is not used this month it does not get swept up or quietly re-spent. It rolls forward. After a few quiet months the wants account is not an allowance any more, it is a few hundred pounds — and nobody planned it as a buffer, but it works as one.
The order is decided in advance, while nothing is going wrong. Wants first. Investing in yourself second. The emergency fund last, and by a distance. Deciding it now is the point — otherwise the decision gets made at eleven at night with a bill in your hand, which is when it goes on a card.
That is three layers of defence rather than one. Read as a monthly budget, a 2% bucket looks like a rounding error. Read as part of a shock absorber, it is not. The month that stress-tested this.
A budget that balances on paper and not in the account is a wish. The number worth watching is the one at the bottom of your statement next month.
Unassigned money is the money that disappears. It does not get spent on anything memorable. It just stops being there around the 24th.
How this is worked out
- Everything is monthly. Anything annual — car insurance, a TV licence, Christmas — divide by twelve and put the slice in, rather than leaving it off and being surprised by it.
- Targets are 70% needs, 8% wants, 10% debt, 10% pay yourself, 2% investments, applied to money in. They total 100. Once the debt is gone it becomes 70/8/20/2.
- "Left to assign" is money in minus everything listed. Zero is the target: not zero in the bank, zero unallocated.
- The percentages are a direction of travel, not a test. UK housing costs put plenty of households above 70% on needs alone, and that is a rent problem rather than a discipline problem — the useful question is which way the number is moving, not whether you hit it this month.
- Debt here means what you pay toward debt, including minimums. Investing in yourself means anything that makes you more capable — a book, a course, a seminar, a tool — as readily as it means a stocks and shares ISA.
- Your figures are saved in this browser on this device only. Nothing is uploaded. Use "Start from the example again" to wipe them.
Before you act on this
This is general information, not financial advice. The Quiet Reset is written from personal experience rather than professional qualification, nothing here is a personal recommendation, and I don't know your circumstances. If any of that 2% goes into markets rather than a book or a course, investing carries risk and you can get back less than you put in. If your needs come to more than your income, that is not a budgeting failure and no spreadsheet will fix it — free and impartial help is available from MoneyHelper, Citizens Advice, National Debtline and StepChange, and it is worth checking on GOV.UK whether you are missing anything you are entitled to.
This is Pillar 01: Money