A book plenty of us have on the shelf
If you've talked about money with friends or family over the last decade, there's a fair chance someone brought up The Barefoot Investor. Scott Pape's book first came out in 2016, was updated as a Classic Edition in 2022, and is still the one plenty of Australians reach for when they decide to get their finances sorted.
It's easy to see why. It's written in plain language, it doesn't assume you know any jargon, and it gives you things to actually do: split your pay into separate accounts, knock off your debts one at a time, save up for a home. Many of us love it for exactly that.
Reading it is the easy part
The trouble starts when you sit down with your own pay slip. A book has to work in round numbers and percentages, and your pay, rent and debts rarely line up with them. The questions that come up are usually about your own figures:
- What does each share of my pay actually come to each fortnight?
- If I pay my smallest debt off first, how does that compare with going after the highest interest rate?
- How long will a deposit take if property prices keep rising while I save?
None of these are hard sums, but they're fiddly, and they're easy to get wrong on the back of a serviette. Sometimes it just helps to see the numbers laid out, month by month, on a chart.
Three new calculators
So we built three. They don't follow the book step by step, and they don't use its names for anything. They do the arithmetic behind the kind of plan it describes.
Pay split planner
The Pay split planner takes your take-home pay and splits it into buckets you name and size yourself. It starts with the book's 60/10/10/20 split, which Scott Pape sums up on his website, opens in a new tab as 60% for daily expenses, 20% to put out financial fires, 10% for fun and 10% to save for longer-term things. You can rename and resize every bucket, and add or remove them as long as one is left. It shows what each one comes to per week, fortnight, month and year, flags anything you haven't allocated, and works out how many months an emergency savings buffer takes to build.
Debt payoff planner
The Debt payoff planner takes up to eight debts and runs them through two orders from the same monthly budget: smallest balance first, the order the book uses, and highest interest rate first. The default example has a personal loan, a credit card and a car loan totalling $22,500. Their minimum repayments add up to $630 a month, and you put in an extra $300, so $930 a month goes to the debts. Both orders are debt-free in month 28. Highest rate first costs $226.73 less in interest, while smallest balance first clears the personal loan 10 months sooner. The planner doesn't pick a winner. Which of those matters more is up to you.
Home deposit savings
Home deposit savings works out how long a deposit takes at a set monthly saving, or how much you'd need to put away each month to get there in a number of months you choose. Property prices keep moving while you save, so the target moves too. The default example is a 20% deposit on a $750,000 property, with $20,000 already saved, savings earning 4.5% a year before tax and the property price growing 2.5% a year. Saving $2,500 a month, it takes 52 months, and by then the deposit needed has grown from $150,000 to $166,940.
What they won't tell you
These are general calculators. They show what happens to the numbers you put in, under assumptions you can see and change. They won't tell you which order to do things in, how much to spend, or whether any part of the book suits your situation. Things like job security, family, or a loan with exit fees can change the answer, and that's where a licensed financial adviser comes in.
As with everything else on figuresmate, the math runs in your browser. Nothing you type, including the names you give your buckets and debts, is sent anywhere or saved.
figuresmate is not affiliated with Scott Pape or the publishers of The Barefoot Investor, and none of this is endorsed by them.