How does Nivritee benchmark my spending?

The Money Manager — Nivritee’s pages for income, spending, loans and goals — reads your spending two ways, and never lets one soften the other. The first asks whether the household can carry what it spends; the second asks whether each line looks typical for a household where you live. Each reading carries a word as well as a colour: Looks right, Worth a look or Worth reconsidering.

1. Against your own income

All your spending plus every loan payment, as a share of your income before tax. Under 70% reads Looks right, 70% to under 95% Worth a look, and 95% or more Worth reconsidering. This is the band on the What you spend card, which says it is Measured against your own income, not against anybody else’s spending.

2. Against a typical range for where you live

• Where: the country you earn and spend in today, not the one you will settle in. A home country Nivritee has no table for gets no comparison, rather than a neighbour’s.
• Your city: under Tell us more in Action Items you can say whether you live in a major metro, a large city, a smaller city, or a town or rural area. Everyday lines are scaled for it.
• Your own figures: costs of running a home are a share of that home’s value, and discretionary lines such as dining out and travel are a share of what you already spend.
• Each kind of inflation: once you break spending into categories, health rises at medical inflation, school fees at education inflation and the rest at general inflation, each at your country’s default rate unless you change it.

Under-stating a cost is flagged sooner than over-stating one, because a cost written too low makes a plan look better than it is. A line left at zero on something everyone pays, such as groceries, reads Worth a look; a zero on something you may simply not have, such as pets, is left alone.