Data

Every calculation on SimpleBudgetPlanner is logged anonymously — income band, pay frequency, and which budget split someone chose. No names, no emails, no identifying information. Once that dataset reaches a meaningful sample size, this page becomes home to original, citable reports built from it.

What’s coming

• “What 1,000 real budgets look like” — how people actually split take-home pay by income band, compared against the 50/30/20 textbook split.
• Pay-frequency preferences by income — who chooses to budget monthly vs. biweekly vs. weekly, and whether that correlates with income level.
• Quarterly trend updates — as the sample grows, tracking how chosen splits shift over time.

Why wait?

A report built on a handful of sessions is not a dataset, it’s noise. We would rather publish nothing than publish a chart with an n of 40. Check back — or bookmark this page — once real usage has accumulated. In the meantime, the numbers referenced across this site come from public sources; see Methodology for federal tax and FICA data, and Budget Benchmarks by Income for BLS spending data.

Last updated July 9, 2026. Figures use current IRS and BLS data — see methodology.