A starter zero-based budget for a $4,000 monthly income, free and instant.
This tool runs entirely as JavaScript in your browser. the income and category names/amounts you enter — all of it stays in this browser’s local storage only, never sent to a server is never transmitted over the network to this site's server or any third party, and is never written to a cookie, to browser storage, or to any log — there is nothing on our end to breach, subpoena, or accidentally leak, because it was never received in the first place. Closing or refreshing this tab clears it completely.
This describes only what this specific tool does with what you type into it. It doesn't cover the rest of this site — see the Privacy Policy for how analytics and advertising cookies are handled elsewhere.
Zero-based budgeting starts from nothing rather than a fixed template — you define every category yourself, from rent to savings to a specific goal, and keep adding and adjusting until your income minus every category lands at exactly zero. The name comes from that target: zero unassigned, zero unaccounted for, every dollar given a job.
Unlike 50/30/20, 70/20/10, or the 6 Jars system, there's no fixed bucket structure here — you might have three categories or fifteen, and there's no target percentage to compare against, since the categories themselves are entirely up to you. A category literally named "Savings" or "Investments" is what this tool looks for to offer an investment cross-link — nothing is assumed on your behalf.
For an expense that's genuinely annual rather than monthly, divide the yearly amount by 12 and enter that monthly-equivalent figure as its own category.
You’ll see the gap clearly — a positive "remaining" figure means you still have unassigned money; a negative one means you’ve allocated more than you actually have. Neither is an error, just information to act on by adjusting a category.
Because zero-based budgeting is specifically about defining your own categories rather than fitting your spending into someone else’s fixed buckets — that flexibility is the whole point of the method.
Yes — saved in this browser’s local storage only, tied to this device and browser. A different device or browser starts fresh.
Name one of your categories something containing "Savings" or "Investment" — the tool looks for that wording specifically, since it can’t otherwise know which of your own categories represents money to invest.
Choose this if you want full control over your own categories rather than a fixed template, and you’re disciplined about actually reconciling to zero each month. If you’d rather start from an established structure, 50/30/20, 70/20/10, or 6 Jars give you one; if you want hard per-category spending limits instead, use the envelope system.