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Scott Pape's barefoot buckets calculator

Split take-home pay 60/10/10/20 the way Scott Pape’s Serviette Strategy does, per pay and per year, and price the gap where your spending already exceeds it.

Scott Pape Reviewed Aug 16, 2026 Rule located in Scott Pape, The Barefoot Investor, 2012
Interactive model

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The source establishes the rule. The values below belong to you, and the output is JMM's deterministic calculation.

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Daily Expenses over the 60% benchmark, per pay$60.00the benchmark on $2,400 a pay is $1,440 and you entered $1,500
Your Daily Expenses share of take-home pay
62.5%against the 60% benchmark the article states, which is the only figure on this page that is his rather than yours
What the overrun costs over a year
$1,56026 pays a year at $60 a pay
Fire Extinguisher left if the overrun comes out of it
$420the 20% share is $480 a pay and stays $480; this is what would remain of it, and a negative figure means the overrun is larger than the bucket
Money the four buckets do not account for
$80.00the four shares add to exactly 100, so a positive figure is genuine surplus and a negative one is genuine overcommitment

Amounts are Australian dollars, printed by the same formatter every model on this site uses. The four shares are stated on take-home pay, meaning after-tax household income, so a gross figure entered here will overstate all four targets. Mojo and Grow are separate buckets in the same article and are not funded by these percentages: Mojo starts at $2,000 of its own and Grow is superannuation and investments. Nothing here is rebalanced — if your Daily Expenses run over 60%, the shortfall is reported at $60 a pay and the four benchmark shares stay exactly where the article puts them.

A year of Fire Extinguisher saving, as published and after your overrun
$0$3k$6k$9k$12k01326
At the published 20%After the overrun is funded from itPays from now
Inspect the calculationThe same result in a readable record view

Daily Expenses

Per pay
$1,440
A year
$37,440
You entered
$1,500
Your share
62.5%

Splurge

Per pay
$240
A year
$6,240
You entered
$220
Your share
9.2%

Smile

Per pay
$240
A year
$6,240
You entered
$200
Your share
8.3%

Fire Extinguisher

Per pay
$480
A year
$12,480
You entered
$400
Your share
16.7%
Source and translation

What the source says, and what the calculator adds

Source-supported rulePape splits take-home pay — his words are “your after-tax household income” — into four automatic transfers: 60% stays in Daily Expenses for food, shelter and the rest of running the household, 10% goes to a Splurge account to be spent on whatever you like, 10% to a Smile account for goals that take longer than a few weeks of wages, and 20% to a Fire Extinguisher account used to put out whichever financial fire is burning at the time. Mojo and Grow are separate buckets in the same article, funded from a starting $2,000 and from superannuation rather than from these four shares.
JMM calculationJMM turns the four shares into dollars on the pay cycle you are actually paid on, per pay and per year, and then does the thing the article never does: measures your own spending against the benchmark and prices the gap. When Daily Expenses run over 60%, the page reports the overrun, what it costs across a year, and what would be left of the Fire Extinguisher if the overrun were funded from it. It never quietly rebalances the percentages to make your numbers fit, because a plan that adjusts itself to whatever you spend is not a plan.
Formula and methodEach bucket’s target is your take-home pay for one pay multiplied by its share: Daily Expenses 60%, Splurge 10%, Smile 10%, Fire Extinguisher 20%. Annual figures multiply by the number of pays a year you enter. The Daily Expenses overrun is your entered spending minus the 60% target when that difference is positive, and zero otherwise; its annual cost is the overrun times your pays a year. The Fire Extinguisher line reports its own 20% target minus that overrun, which is what would be left if the overrun were funded from there — the 20% share itself is never reduced. The residual is take-home pay minus the four amounts you entered, and because the four shares add to exactly one hundred, that residual is a real surplus or a real shortfall.
Scott Pape, The Barefoot Investor Nov 1, 2012Does the Barefoot Investor Still Use ING?Headings “The Barefoot benchmark: live off 60% of your income”, “What about the other 40%?”, “The Mojo Bucket” and “The Grow Bucket”. The benchmark reads “a good yardstick is allocating 60 % of your take-home pay (i.e. your after-tax household income) to food, shelter and Netflix”; the next section reads “10% Splurge: You are hereby directed to go out and blow 10% of your take-home pay on anything that makes you feel good”, “10% Smile: Another 10% of your take-home pay should be automatically transferred to another online savings account”, and “20% Fire Extinguisher: Finally, allocate 20% of your take home pay to your ‘Fire Extinguisher’ account”. The article carries no publication date; the date recorded here is the article’s own dateline for the Serviette Strategy scene, printed as “Date: 1 November 2012 / Location: Romsey Pub (Romsey, Victoria)”. Scott Pape, The Barefoot Investor Aug 16, 2026The Barefoot StepsStep 2, headed “Set Up Your Buckets”: “This is what I call my ‘Serviette Strategy’ – a simple three ‘bucket’ solution where you put your money on autopilot so you’ll never have to worry about it again.” Cited for the buckets’ place in his own numbered sequence and for the three-bucket framing the four percentages sit inside. The page carries no publication date; the date recorded here is the day JMM retrieved and quoted it.
Decision notes

What changes the answer

The four shares add to exactly one hundred, and almost no rival plan does

Most published budget splits are overlapping ranges that sum to more than the money exists to fill, so a household can sit inside every band and still be short. These four are a partition of take-home pay. That is why the residual this page reports is meaningful: on the numbers loaded here it is $80 a pay of genuine surplus, and a negative figure would be a genuine hole rather than a rounding artefact.

The 60% benchmark is where the plan is won or lost

The other three shares are consequences. On the loaded numbers Daily Expenses run at 62.5% of take-home pay, which is $60 a pay over the benchmark and $1,560 across a year, and that single overrun is larger than the shortfall in the Splurge, Smile and Fire Extinguisher buckets combined. The question this page is actually answering is whether your fixed costs fit under three fifths of your pay.

An overrun has to come from somewhere, and the page says where

The Fire Extinguisher is the only bucket with enough in it to absorb a Daily Expenses overrun without cancelling a plan feature outright. Funding a $60 overrun from a $480 Fire Extinguisher leaves $420, which is a 12.5% share of pay wearing a 20% label. The page reports that as a consequence rather than applying it, because the moment the percentages move to fit the spending they stop being a benchmark.

The best-designed consumer budget split in circulation, and the 60% is still the hard part

JMM’s position is that the structure here is unusually good and the benchmark is unusually demanding, and the two facts are related. Almost every rival plan hands out overlapping ranges that add to more than one hundred, which lets a household comply with all of them and still run out of money; this one partitions take-home pay exactly, so the arithmetic cannot be satisfied twice. The automation is the other thing worth copying — four standing transfers on payday means the plan runs whether or not anyone is paying attention, and the Splurge account is a deliberate release valve rather than an oversight. What deserves argument is the 60%. In an expensive Australian capital, rent or a mortgage alone can clear three fifths of take-home pay before food, transport or insurance are counted, and the rule offers no geographic adjustment and no alternative ordering. Pape is explicit that it is a yardstick rather than a law, which is more honest than most, but the page a reader lands on should tell them the yardstick’s cost rather than grading them against it and stopping there. Use the 60% as a diagnostic: if you cannot get under it, the answer is almost always one large fixed cost, not four small habits.

Written by the JMM editor. This is a view, not a recommendation for your circumstances. Who writes this

Not the calculator’s limits. The rule’s.

  1. Sixty per cent of take-home pay is unreachable in the expensive half of the country

    Median asking rents in Sydney and Brisbane consume a large share of a median take-home income before a single other bill is paid. For those households the benchmark is not a discipline problem, it is arithmetic, and a plan that grades them a failure on their first pay teaches them that plans do not work rather than teaching them anything about money.

  2. The Fire Extinguisher does four different jobs and the rule never sequences them

    Credit card debt, a home deposit and extra mortgage payments are all named as fires the same 20% puts out. Those three have completely different returns — clearing a card at twenty-plus per cent is not comparable with adding to a deposit — and the rule leaves the ordering entirely to the household at exactly the moment the ordering is worth the most money.

  3. It is stated per pay, which quietly ignores the bills that do not arrive per pay

    Insurance premiums, registration, school fees and utility accounts land in lumps. A household that meets the 60% benchmark in eleven months of the year and blows through it in the twelfth has followed the rule and still needed the Fire Extinguisher for something that was never an emergency, and nothing in the four shares provides for that.

  4. The percentages assume a single household pooling one income

    The article describes the plan being drawn for a couple who had previously kept their money separate, and every share is stated on household income. Separated finances, shared custody, an adult child contributing board or a second job that stops without notice all break the base the four shares are measured against, and the rule addresses none of them.

Limits

What this model does not know

  • The base is take-home pay, meaning after-tax household income. Entering a gross figure inflates all four targets and makes the benchmark look easier than it is.
  • Amounts are Australian dollars, printed by the same formatter every model on this site uses, which draws a plain dollar sign.
  • Mojo and Grow are not funded by these four percentages. Mojo starts at its own $2,000 and Grow is superannuation and other investments, so a household following the whole system is committing more than the 40% these shares send out of Daily Expenses.
  • There is no debt bucket. The article puts debt inside the Fire Extinguisher as one of the fires it is used to put out, so minimum payments already inside your daily spending will read as an over-benchmark lifestyle rather than as debt.
  • Nothing here adjusts for irregular or seasonal income, and the shares are stated per pay rather than per year, so a lumpy income has to be smoothed before entry.
Questions people ask

Before you use the result

Is 60% of gross or take-home pay?

Take-home. The article says “60 % of your take-home pay (i.e. your after-tax household income)”, so entering a gross figure here will overstate every bucket.

Where do Mojo and Grow fit?

They are separate buckets in the same article and they are not funded by these four percentages. Mojo is a standalone account opened with $2,000, and Grow is your super fund and other investments. This page models only the four shares of take-home pay.

What if my Daily Expenses are already over 60%?

The page shows the overrun in dollars per pay and per year, and what would be left of the Fire Extinguisher if you funded the overrun from it. It does not rescale the percentages, because a benchmark that moves to match your spending is no longer a benchmark.

Does this work if I am paid weekly or monthly?

Yes. Enter the take-home amount you receive each pay and how many pays you get a year — 52 weekly, 26 fortnightly, 24 twice a month, 12 monthly — and both the per-pay and annual figures follow.

Is debt one of the buckets?

No. The article names credit card debt as one of the financial fires the 20% Fire Extinguisher account is used to put out, alongside a home deposit and paying off a mortgage. There is no separate debt share and no stated order between those three uses.

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