Scott Pape's three-month Mojo calculator
Pape publishes two Mojo stages: $2,000 to open the account, then three months of living expenses. Size both on your own essentials and date each one.
Scott Pape Reviewed Aug 16, 2026 Rule located in Scott Pape, The Barefoot Investor, 2012 Put your numbers through the rule
The source establishes the rule. The values below belong to you, and the output is JMM's deterministic calculation.
Every field recalculates immediately. Changed values can be copied into a shareable URL.
- Still to save to reach the $2,000 starter
- $800the article says open the account with $2,000, and that stage comes first
- Months of essentials your balance covers today
- 0.3against the three months Step 6 asks for
- Months to the starter at your monthly amount
- 2 monthsat $450 a month, with no interest assumed
- Months to three months of essentials
- 24 monthsat $450 a month, with no interest assumed
- What the starter is as a share of the full target
- 16.7%$2,000 against $12,000: the distance between the two published stages, on your own expenses
Amounts are Australian dollars. Both targets come from Pape and neither is JMM's: $2,000 is what the buckets article says to open the account with, and three months of living expenses is Step 6. The timeline assumes the monthly amount never changes and earns nothing, so a real account in a high-interest saver reaches the target slightly sooner. What counts as essential is your call — this page excludes whatever you enter as nonessential and shows you what including it would have done to the target. This is not a comparison with any other emergency-fund rule and takes no position on which target is better.
Housing
- A month
- $1,900
- Three months
- $5,700
- Share of essentials
- 47.5%
Food
- A month
- $850
- Three months
- $2,550
- Share of essentials
- 21.3%
Transport
- A month
- $550
- Three months
- $1,650
- Share of essentials
- 13.8%
Other essentials
- A month
- $700
- Three months
- $2,100
- Share of essentials
- 17.5%
Excluded, nonessential
- A month
- $900
- Three months
- $2,700
- Share of essentials
- 22.5%
What the source says, and what the calculator adds
Source-supported rulePape publishes the Mojo account in two stages and both are stated as amounts. The buckets article says to open a totally separate high-interest online savings account with $2,000 to start with, kept away from an offset account, a redraw facility and the everyday transaction account, and touched only in a genuine emergency. Step 6 of the Barefoot Steps then says to boost that Mojo to three months of living expenses, and describes the move as one that takes character. Neither source defines living expenses, gives a timeline, or states which of the two amounts a household should be aiming at first. 
JMM calculationJMM keeps the two published stages apart and sizes both on your own numbers, because the $2,000 is a fixed amount and the three months is not: the gap between them is set entirely by what your household costs to run. The page dates each stage at the monthly amount you are actually saving, reports how many months of essentials your current balance covers, and shows the starter as a share of the full target — on the loaded figures $2,000 is one sixth of a $12,000 target, which is the honest measure of how far apart the two stages are. It also prints what the target would have been had your nonessential spending been counted, so the exclusion is visible rather than assumed. What changes the answer
The two stages are a sequence, not a choice
The $2,000 is stated in the article that opens the account and the three months is Step 6, six steps into a nine-step sequence that has buying a home and lifting super in between. Reading them as competing targets misses the design: the starter exists so the account is never empty, and the three months exists so a job loss is survivable. On the loaded numbers the starter is one sixth of the full target, which is roughly the ratio the sequence is built around.
The full target is a fact about your fixed costs, not about your income
Three months of essentials at $4,000 a month is $12,000, and the same household with $2,500 of essentials needs $7,500 regardless of what either earns. That is why a high earner in an expensive city can need a bigger Mojo than a modest earner in a cheap one, and why the only useful version of this rule is one run on your own categories.
What you exclude moves the target more than what you save
On the loaded figures, counting the $900 a month of cuttable spending would lift the target from $12,000 to $14,700 — more than five months of the entered contribution. The definition of “living expenses” is doing more work here than the number three, and neither source defines it, so the page shows both readings and lets the reader own the boundary.
Two stages, both stated as amounts, and the second one is the one that survives a job loss
JMM’s position is that the two-stage structure is the right shape and the second stage is doing almost all of the work. A $2,000 starter is not an emergency fund and was never claimed to be — it is a buffer that stops a flat tyre becoming a credit card balance, and its real job is behavioural: an account with money in it gets treated as an account, while an empty one gets closed. Three months of living expenses is the number that changes outcomes, because the emergency this bucket exists for is a lost income rather than a broken appliance, and lost income is measured in months. The design choices around it are good ones: a separate institution from the everyday account, no offset and no redraw, and a stated rule that it is only touched for a genuine emergency. Where JMM parts company is the placement. Step 6 puts three months of cash after buying a home and after lifting super to 15%, which asks a household to take on a mortgage and lock money away until 60 before it can survive a quarter without pay. That is the wrong order for anyone whose income is not secure, and the fix is not a different number, it is moving the step.
Not the calculator’s limits. The rule’s.
Neither source defines living expenses, and the definition sets the target
Three months of what a household spends and three months of what it must spend can differ by thirty per cent or more. On the numbers loaded here that difference is $2,700, and nothing in either source says which reading is intended. A rule whose answer moves that much on an undefined word is under-specified, and this page has to ask the reader to draw the line the rule should have drawn.
Three months is one number for every household
A public servant with two decades of tenure and a contractor between engagements have completely different odds of needing the money and completely different times to re-employment. Comparable rules elsewhere publish a range and make the household choose inside it. This one publishes a point, with no adjustment for dependants, income stability, insurance or a second earner.
It sits sixth, behind a mortgage and behind locking money away until 60
The step ordering asks a household to buy a home and raise super to 15 per cent before holding three months of expenses in cash. For anyone with an insecure income that is an instruction to take on the largest fixed cost of their life while carrying a $2,000 buffer, and superannuation contributed at Step 5 cannot be accessed for the emergency Step 6 exists to cover.
What this model does not know
- Amounts are Australian dollars, printed by the same formatter every model on this site uses.
- What counts as essential is your judgment. The page excludes whatever you enter as cuttable and shows you what including it would have done to the target, but it does not decide the boundary for you.
- The timeline assumes the monthly amount never changes and earns nothing, so a real high-interest account reaches each stage slightly sooner than the figure here.
- Irregular annual costs — insurance premiums, registration, school fees — have to be converted to a monthly figure before entry or the target will read low.
- Neither published stage is adjusted for job security, dependants, insurance cover or access to credit, and nothing in the model prices those.
- This page models Pape’s two stages only. It is not a comparison with any other emergency-fund rule and takes no position on which target is better.
Before you use the result
Is the $2,000 an emergency fund?
No, and the source does not call it one. It is the amount the article says to open the Mojo account with, and Step 6 is where the account becomes an emergency fund at three months of living expenses.
Should I count rent and a mortgage as living expenses?
This page counts whatever you enter under housing, and housing is normally the largest essential. What it excludes is only what you tell it you would cut, and it shows you what the target would have been had that spending been counted too.
Where should Mojo be kept?
The article is specific: a totally separate high-interest online savings account, not an offset account, not a redraw facility attached to the mortgage, and not linked to the everyday transaction account. The separation is the point.
Does the timeline include interest?
No. The months figure divides the remaining gap by your monthly contribution with no return assumed, so a real high-interest account gets there slightly sooner than this page says.
Why is there no completion month sometimes?
Because you entered nothing going in each month while a gap is still open. A plan with no contribution has no completion date, so the page reports the figure as unavailable rather than printing a month that does not exist.
The next question this page cannot answer
-
Dave Ramsey, sourced rule Emergency fund calculator The other published two-stage emergency fund, with a range instead of a point. Neither target is better; the difference is that one makes the household choose and the other does not.
Open → - Scott Pape, sourced rule Barefoot buckets calculator
Where the money to fill this bucket comes from. The four shares of take-home pay are the cash-flow side of the same system, and the Fire Extinguisher is the bucket the overrun lands on.
Open → -
Calculator Savings goal solver The same target with interest and a chosen date, rather than the zero-return baseline this page reports so the arithmetic stays the rule’s own.
Open →