Festival Expense Planner

The old version of this page asked for a festival budget and six category amounts, added the six, subtracted them from the budget, and reported whether you were over. Every one of those seven figures came from you. The output was arithmetic you had already done in your head, dressed up as a calculator, and it compared your spending against a number you invented — so it could only ever tell you whether the number you invented was big enough.

What breaks festivals financially is not the total. It is the part of the total your cash does not cover. So the first tab asks for cash you will genuinely have set aside by then, which is a fact rather than an intention, and reports the shortfall: ₹43,000 of plan against ₹30,000 of cash is ₹13,000 that has to come from somewhere. The other two tabs price the places it usually comes from.

The category list still exists, and it still earns its place — naming the largest head is useful, because on the defaults shopping is 37.2% of the festival and that is where a cut actually moves the number. But the categories are the input. The cost of the gap is the output.

This is the mechanism almost nobody prices correctly, and it is the reason a festival on a credit card costs more than the shortfall suggests. The interest-free credit period on a card is conditional: it survives only if the total amount due is cleared by the due date. Clear all of it and the borrowing was free. Fall short by any amount and the free period is forfeited, and interest may be levied from the transaction date on the outstanding, adjusted for what you did pay.

So the ₹13,000 shortfall on a ₹43,000 festival bill does not start earning interest at the due date. It starts at the purchase. Thirty days at 3.5% a month adds ₹455 before the first statement in which you are a borrower — money that appears from nowhere, on a bill you thought you had mostly paid.

The rate is the other half of it. Card interest is quoted per month because 3.5% sounds survivable. Compounded, it is 51.11% a year. This is the most expensive credit an ordinary household has access to, more expensive than a personal loan by a wide margin, and the monthly quote is doing the work of hiding that.

The instalments on a no-cost EMI really are interest-free, which is why the claim is hard to argue with by looking at the statement. The cost is charged somewhere the statement never shows: the instant discount you would have received for paying in full, and which the EMI option quietly withdraws.

A ₹45,000 phone with a ₹4,000 bank discount on full payment costs ₹41,000 today. Take the six-month no-cost EMI, forfeit the discount, add a ₹199 processing fee, and you pay ₹45,199 — ₹4,199 more for the privilege of spreading it. Run that as what it is, ₹40,801 financed and repaid in six instalments of ₹7,500, and the effective rate is 40.47% a year. Not zero, and not far off a revolving card.

The tool asks for the discount specifically because that is the field the offer page does not put next to the EMI table. If the discount applies on EMI too and there is no fee, enter zero and the rate comes out at zero — the offer is then genuinely free, and some are. The point is to check rather than assume, and RBI explicitly prohibits presenting an interest-bearing EMI as no-cost, which tells you the practice was common enough to need a rule.

One thing the arithmetic cannot settle: a no-cost EMI at a genuine 0% is free money and worth taking, but it also commits six months of cash flow to a purchase you could have skipped. The rate being zero says nothing about whether you needed the phone.

Medical bills arrive unannounced. A car breaks when it breaks. Diwali does not. Neither does Eid, Durga Puja, Christmas or the wedding season, and that predictability is the whole opportunity — a festival is the rare large expense you can fund from income instead of from credit, purely because you know the month.

The tool prints the monthly set-aside for exactly that reason: ₹43,000 over the eleven months to the next one is ₹3,909 a month. That figure is not a savings lecture. It is the direct comparison to the alternative, which on the same money is ₹455 of retrospective interest, ₹1,850.91 more to clear it over six months, and a card that spent half the year full.

Where the set-aside sits matters less than that it exists, but it should not sit in the account your UPI comes out of. A recurring deposit or a separate savings account both work; the second one is worth choosing on the same reasoning as the first tab, because cash you can see is cash you will spend.

That your categories are roughly right, which they will not be. Festival spending overshoots, and misc is the head that absorbs it — delivery charges, local transport, tips, donations, the sweets you buy twice. If your misc reads zero the total is low, and the shortfall is larger than the tool says.

The card tab uses a flat monthly rate on a 30-day month and prices interest from the transaction date, which is the treatment the rules permit once the total due is missed. Issuers differ in the detail, GST applies on interest and fees, and a cash withdrawal is charged differently and from day one. Read your own most important terms and conditions rather than trusting the default 3.5%.

The minimum-due projection assumes 5% of the outstanding, every month, forever, with nothing new spent on the card. Real minimums vary by issuer and are sometimes a percentage plus the full interest and fees. Spending again while revolving resets the picture entirely, and that is the normal case rather than the exception.

The EMI tab assumes the discount you enter is genuinely lost by converting. Sometimes it is not, sometimes it is capped, and sometimes the fee attracts GST on top. The number to check on the offer page is what you would pay today in full, against the sum of every instalment plus every fee.

Everything runs in your browser and nothing is stored between visits. Keep your own note of the category figures — comparing this festival against the last one is more useful than either number alone.