Split take-home pay across needs, wants, savings.
Needs (50%)
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Rent or mortgage, power, food, transport.
Wants (30%)
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Savings / debt (20%)
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Your breakdown
Updates live as you type| Category | Monthly | Weekly |
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Worked example
Take a monthly take-home pay of $5,000, the amount that actually lands in your account after PAYE, ACC, and KiwiSaver. The 50/30/20 rule splits it three ways. Half, or $2,500, is for needs: rent or mortgage, power, food, insurance, and getting to work. These are the costs you cannot easily avoid.
Thirty percent, or $1,500, is for wants: eating out, streaming subscriptions, hobbies, and travel. The final 20 percent, $1,000, goes to savings or paying down debt faster than the minimum. In dollars a week that is about $577 for needs, $346 for wants, and $231 towards savings. In higher-rent cities like Auckland and Wellington the needs slice often blows past 50 percent, so treat the split as a target and shift the percentages to fit your real costs rather than forcing your life into the rule.
How it is calculated
The calculator takes your monthly take-home pay and multiplies it by three fixed fractions: 0.5 for needs, 0.3 for wants, and 0.2 for savings or extra debt repayment. Because the three shares add to 100 percent, every dollar of net pay is allocated. It is deliberately simple, which is its strength as a starting framework. The key is to use take-home pay, the money after tax and deductions, not your gross salary, otherwise the targets will be too high. If your fixed needs already exceed half your pay, which is common with New Zealand housing costs, the realistic move is to trim the wants share rather than abandon saving entirely. You can use the weekly figures if you are paid weekly or fortnightly, since many household bills and rents in New Zealand run on a weekly cycle.