Pay Raise Allocator

This calculator isolates the marginal impact of a raise rather than your whole paycheck, which is the point: it takes just the raise amount (current salary times raise percentage), applies your marginal tax bracket to find the after-tax increase, and divides by 12 to get the extra take-home cash you'll see each month. It then routes that new money through one of three fixed allocation rules depending on your situation: if you carry high-interest debt, 50% goes to debt, 30% to savings, and 20% to lifestyle; if you're debt-free but saving less than 15% of income already, 60% goes to savings and 40% to lifestyle; otherwise it splits 50/50 between savings and lifestyle. Finally, it estimates your new overall savings rate by adding the new monthly savings allocation to what you were already saving (derived from your current savings rate and after-tax income) and dividing by your new, larger after-tax monthly income.

The design intent is to fight lifestyle inflation: rather than asking what to do with your whole paycheck, it deliberately isolates just the raise and nudges most of it toward debt or savings before it quietly gets absorbed into everyday spending. The three-tier allocation split is a fixed heuristic built into the tool, not a personalized optimization — it doesn't know your actual interest rates, how close you are to specific savings goals, or whether "lifestyle" money is going toward something meaningful to you. It also applies your marginal tax bracket to the entire raise amount as a simplification; in reality only the portion of income crossing into a new bracket would be taxed at that rate, so the after-tax raise figure is an approximation that's most accurate when the raise doesn't push you across a bracket boundary.