How to Use the Calculator

The calculator helps you explore assumptions about household liquidity. Read the methodology before treating an estimate as relevant to your situation.

Enter your budget

• Annual take-home income: what reaches your bank account in a year.
• Liquid assets: cash and accessible savings. Exclude home equity and assets you cannot readily withdraw.
• Monthly essential costs: housing, food, utilities, necessary insurance and childcare. Do not include debt payments here.
• Monthly debt payments: minimum required payments. Avoid counting a payment in both cost fields.
• Insurance and deductible: PPO/HMO presets use illustrative coverage rates, not actual policy terms. Enter a plausible remaining deductible and check your real policy separately.

ZIP code and household size are not calculation inputs. Costs come from the amounts you enter.

Choose a scenario

• Job loss: set a duration; the model deducts an illustrative benefit from monthly costs.
• Medical bill: set the bill and deductible. The model does not include an annual out-of-pocket cap.
• Essential-cost increase: set the percentage and duration. This increases all essential costs excluding debt, rather than rent alone.
• Combo: adds all three shocks.

The breakdown shows the selected costs plus one month of base buffer. The top risk driver is the largest selected cost.

Read the result

The distance is liquid assets minus the required buffer. A negative value means the chosen assumptions require more cash than entered.

Baseline runway uses assets divided by baseline essential outflow, converted at 30 days per month. It is independent of the shock scenario. Cash-buffer coverage is a ratio, not a probability of surviving a shock. Colour zones follow the rules published in the methodology.

Try changing one assumption at a time: essential spending, debt payments, available savings, or shock duration. Estimates are sensitive to these inputs.

Local storage and sharing

No account is required. Inputs are saved in this browser’s local storage for convenience; clear site data to remove them.

“Copy share link” puts the figures in the URL fragment after #. For example:

/calculator#income=90000&assets=15000&fixed=4200&debt=600&scenario=combo

The fragment is read in the recipient’s browser and is not included in the page request sent to the server. Anyone with the link can see the figures, so share only with people you trust. Do not enter personal identifiers. Older query-parameter links are still supported, but their values are included in server requests.

Disclaimer

This is an educational estimate, not financial, legal, medical or investment advice. Verify assumptions against your own budget, insurance and benefits.