Salary Budget Planner

Every salary budget tool compares a total against a total. Income on one side, commitments on the other, and a verdict about whether the second is smaller than the first. That comparison is silent about the thing that actually breaks months, which is that money leaves your account on fixed dates and arrives on one.

Take the defaults, which balance comfortably: ₹78,000 in, ₹54,000 of rent, EMI, bills and SIP out, ₹24,000 left. Now put the salary on the 7th, which is normal, and the SIP on the 1st, the rent on the 2nd and the EMI on the 5th, which is also normal. The SIP fails on day one, ₹7,000 short. By the 6th the account is ₹43,800 under. Then the salary lands and the month closes exactly where it started, at ₹8,000, having failed three payments on the way.

Nothing about the totals changed. The same income and the same commitments, dated differently, is the difference between a month that works and a month that costs you three dishonour charges. So the second tab walks the calendar one day at a time and reports the lowest the balance goes, on which date, and which debit is the first to fail.

If debits are dated before payday, some amount has to be permanently parked in the salary account for them to clear. It is not savings, because you can never spend it. It is not a buffer against emergencies, because it is committed to ordinary monthly bills. It is working capital for your own current account, and almost nobody knows what theirs is.

On the default schedule it is ₹51,800— two thirds of a month’s salary that has to sit still so that the first six days of every month can happen. Money you have but cannot use, and which no statement labels as such.

Moving dates is the cheapest available fix, and the tool lets you price each move before making it. Shifting the SIP from the 1st to the 8th, one day after payday, takes the requirement from ₹51,800 to ₹36,800 — ₹15,000 of your own money released by changing a date in an app. Rent on the 2nd and the EMI on the 5th are what hold the rest of it, and those are the harder ones: a landlord may agree, while a loan EMI date is set at sanction, though some lenders will change it once. Get all four behind payday and the buffer goes to zero.

The point of printing the figure is that “change your SIP date” sounds like housekeeping until it is worth ₹15,000 of cash you can suddenly use.

Automating savings is sound advice and it comes with a failure mode nobody mentions. The standard instruction is to save first, so people set the SIP for the 1st. If the salary arrives on the 5th or the 7th, the 1st is the worst possible date — it is the debit furthest from the money.

A failed SIP is the mildest of the dishonours in cash terms, usually just a skipped instalment. It is the most expensive in outcome, because it is invisible. A bounced EMI produces phone calls and a bureau entry. A bounced SIP produces silence, and a savings plan that has quietly stopped while you still believe it is running.

“Save first” means first out of the salary, not first in the calendar. If the salary lands on the 7th, the 8th is saving first. Ordering the debits behind payday costs nothing and removes the whole problem, which is why the tool reports how much is dated before payday as its own figure.

A daily spending figure is not a rule to obey. Nobody spends ₹800 a day, evenly, for thirty days. Its use is as a scale: it converts a monthly number you cannot feel into a daily one you can check against a single decision. ₹24,000 a month sounds roomy. ₹800 a day, against a ₹600 dinner, does not.

It also makes the middle of the month legible. Spending ₹15,000 in the first ten days is not obviously wrong against a ₹24,000 month, and it is obviously wrong against ₹800 a day. That is the only comparison the figure is for, and it is why the calculation must not have been halved by double-counting.

The savings rate is on the page for the same reason. ₹15,000 is an amount you will keep for years while your salary changes around it; 19.2% of income is a decision you can re-examine at each raise. Percentages survive inflation and increments in a way rupee amounts do not.

A 30-day month and one salary credit on one date. Dates are capped at the 28th so the same schedule holds in February, which matters more than it sounds — a debit dated the 30th is the one that behaves unpredictably, and a payday on the last working day moves around weekends and holidays in a way no calculator can predict for you.

Discretionary spending is spread evenly across the month, which nobody does. Real spending clusters right after payday, which makes the true low point deeper and earlier than the model shows. Read the buffer figure as a floor rather than a target.

It assumes the four commitments are the whole picture. Insurance premiums, school fees, annual subscriptions and festival months all land outside a normal cycle, and a schedule that clears in an ordinary month can still fail in the month the car insurance renews. Run it again with that debit added rather than trusting the ordinary month.

What happens on a failed debit is not modelled, because it varies: banks charge a dishonour or return fee, the collector often adds a late fee, and a missed loan instalment gets reported once the account is past due. The cost is real and it is specific to your bank and your lender, so check your own schedule of charges rather than a number here.

Everything runs in your browser and nothing is stored between visits, which for a page holding your salary and your debit dates is the right default. Keep your own note of the dates — those are the whole input, and they are the thing worth changing.