How the Budgetting tool works

The purpose of this tool is to help you get started, as often, creating a budget can be a daunting task. Hence Piggy Saving will create a budget based on your region and basic household characteristics. This budget guide will show you what a similar household in the area is spending and provide a starting point for you to budget. Armed with your own expenditures, you can customise the budget to reflect personal expenditure.

Step 1: Enter your Household characteristics.

Please take note that salary is the TAKE HOME salary (ie what comes into your bank account) for the whole household in a month. If your salary is paid weekly, then please multiply by four (x4).

Step 2: Customise your Information.

If you know of any specific expenses, then select that expense and assign a value to it. If the expenditure is not relevant to you then you can select it and set it to 0 (zero). Piggy Saving budget allows you to set aside money for specific expenditures, such as car MOT or a holiday. Take the value you are aiming to set aside and then divide it by the number of months you plan to save for that specific expenditure. If none is selected then Piggy Saving budget will ignore these values.

Please select your outward postcode (first half of your postcode) to help use improve the Piggy Saving tool.

Step 3: Understanding your budget guide.

Piggys Saving budget guide is separated into 3 sections:

  • Essentials: These are items that can be considered essential to the household and can not be avoided. For example: Groceries.
  • Wants: These are items that can be considered a nice to have, but can be reduced or cut out if necessary. For example: Eating out or entertainment.
  • Savings: These funds are left over (savings = monthly income - essentials - wants) and can be put aside to save for a rainy day or for a specific goal.

Both the Essential and Want expenses should be paid for on a monthly basis, and therefore results in funds leaving your account/wallet to pay for it. For example: Monthly car insurance, mortgage, or groceries. While in Savings there are two categories, one for essentials and one for wants of set aside expenses. These items do not occur monthly and ideally funds should be set aside for when the expense occurs. For example: going on Holiday, or an upcoming car servicing, house repairs etc.

A really GREAT budget will have a 50/30/20 split between Essentials/Wants/Savings. A Good budget balance to achieve is a 70/20/10 split. These are aspirational targets, and whether they are achievable will depend on your household circumstances. With today’s challenging economic environment being able to achieve a zero or a slightly positive Savings may be difficult enough.

The three sections and two savings categories will list your various expenses and will help you determine where you are spending your money. To assess where you can potentially save money, consider your highest expenditures first and look at each area in the following order:

  • Savings -> Wants Set Aside: Consider postponing some of these expenses, for when you are more financially stable. For example: wait a little longer before upgrading your cell phone.
  • Wants: Consider postponing, reducing or changing to a less expensive alternative. For example: Do you use all your subscription services, if not then consider cancelling some subscriptions.
  • Savings -> Essentials Set Aside: Consider shopping around for less expensive alternatives to spend less. For example: consider 2nd hand options for big ticket items like furniture.
  • Essentials -> Definite Spend: This is most challenging of all areas to reduce expenditure. Consider finding alternative substitutes, where small changes can help in the longer term. For example changing from branded products to the store’s essential product lines (many are the exact same thing with less fancy packaging!) or switching off radiators in rooms that are not in use, etc.

Consider checking Inflation view of your budget so see how your guide budget will change in 1 month, 6 months and 1 year at the current inflation rates.

For tips and suggestions, check out our Money Tips Blog, or follow our bite size Financial Literacy course.

Step 4: Rate Piggy Saving budget

To help us improve our algorithms we would like to ask you to please rate your generated guide budget, provide any comments about the budget and to check the post code of where you reside is correct (the first half of your postal code).

Step 5: Edit your Piggy Saving budget

Once you have rated the guide budget, you are able to edit your budget. Change it to suit your actual expenses per category. Please note that these are still MONTHLY expenses, so if you normally look at weekly expenses, please multiply the expense by four (x4) to estimate a monthly amount

Each time you alter an expense, the tool will automatically update your SAVINGS amount.

Don’t forget to save the fields you have edited!

Step 6: Download your budget

Once you are satisfied with your Piggy Saving budget guide, download it as a CSV file, which can be opened by any spreadsheet program. Use this file to track your actual expenses on a monthly basis. Alternatively, you could try this envelope budgeting system .

Step 7: Seek professional help

If you are struggling to make ends meet financially, there are several organisations that may be able to help:




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