Most people know roughly what they earn. Far fewer can say exactly where it goes."Make a budget" is advice in the same way "eat well" is advice — true, repeated endlessly, and completely silent on the actual method. This book is the method, in plain arithmetic, worked out step by step.
The Budget Math Workout is not about spending less. It is about spending
deliberately — knowing the exact gap between what you planned and what you actually spent, finding the one or two categories that quietly drift, and turning six books' worth of money skills into one honest, whole-picture plan.
You'll learn to:- Build a real monthly budget from a real payslip — income minus expenses, surplus or shortfall, in one subtraction
- Split any income by percentage, and scale it instantly when your pay changes
- Turn every irregular cost — insurance, services, annual fees — into a monthly equivalent, so no bill is ever a "surprise"
- Budget safely on a variable income, using the floor, the average, and a reserve
- Map your cash flow so the timing of bills never catches you short, even when the month balances
- Track spending against the plan and find the leak — including the untracked money the categories miss
- Measure what share of your take-home is promised to debt (the debt-service ratio) and what share you keep (the savings rate)
- Assemble it all into the whole-picture budget — every line on one page, one number at the bottom
On a $3,200 take-home: savings $320, fixed bills $1,280, debt $560, discretionary $900 — leaving a $140 surplus. A lean month at $2,800 turns that into a $260 shortfall, and pausing the saving line for one month brings it back to a $60 surplus. (Illustrative example from Chapter 9; your numbers depend on your own income and costs.)Every chapter also hands you a reusable tool — a budget snapshot, an allocation grid, an irregular-cost converter, a cash-flow timeline, a debt-service check, a savings-rate worksheet, and the whole-picture budget itself — so you finish with a complete budgeting toolkit, plus a
free, printable version of all nine tools to download and reuse.
This is
Book 6 — the capstone of the series. Books 1–5 each taught one line of a budget: what you spend, earn, owe in bills, owe on loans, and save. Here they finally meet on a single page.
Country-neutral throughout: it begins after tax, with your take-home as the input, and teaches the universal method with clearly illustrative figures — so it works wherever you live.
Nine chapters. Worked examples, 200+ practice problems with room to work, full answer keys, and a one-page "Which Number?" reference.
About the level: this is the simplest math in the series — addition, subtraction, and percentages, no calculator needed. The skill isn't the arithmetic; it's getting six easy numbers to agree on one page. If you already balance your budget in your head, this one's for the people around you.
Grab a pencil. Let's find out where it all goes.This book teaches the math and method of budgeting — it is not financial, tax, or legal advice. The debt-service chapter explains an arithmetic metric, not lending rules. Written in collaboration with AI under the author's direction; all mathematical content, problems, examples, and answers have been verified. Figures are illustrative and vary by country. Despite verification, errors may remain.Updated printing — August 2026. Every diagram in this edition is redrawn at a larger type size, so each figure reads cleanly on paper, and the whole set was re-checked at printed size.
