Family Budget Pie Graphs: How-to, Examples, and More!

Post last updated May 21, 2021

In her books, time guru Laura Vanderkam highlights that everyone has the same 168 hours in a week. She notes “life is lived in hours” to emphasize that how we fill our hours, ultimately sums to how we live our lives. I feel similarly about money. Unlike time, however, money is relatively unlimited. So how we earn, steward, spend, and give our money is a statement of our lives, one transaction at a time.

We can’t fill in a week’s calendar of time slots to visualize this impact as we can with Vanderkam’s time diary. But I’m sure you could read through my credit cards statements over the past few months and get a fair idea of what kind of person I am and what’s going on in my life. Heck, Target has mastered an algorithm that knows you’re pregnant just from what you buy! How you spend your money is actually that powerful.

If you want to learn how to map out your money in an intentional way, bookmark this post and keep reading!

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Family Budget Pie Graphs: How-to, Examples, and More!

What's In This Post

Why illustrate your money picture with a pie chart?

A simple way to illustrate how you spend money is with a simple budget pie chart. The total absolute amount is less important for this exercise, but the proportions of how the pieces are divided up are. I love the idea of seeing my pie chart change from multiple slices of debt to multiple slices of charitable giving, for example. Or a giant wedge of mortgage to a little slice of property tax sans principal/interest payments some day!

For visual folks, this is a really easy way to start organizing finances. It helps you set up that vision for your life you need to have as part of your money management plan. For instance, right now we spend about 14% of our take home pay on childcare (which is the lowest it’s ever been, in part due to the pandemic). That wedge will shrink over time and evaporate completely within the next few years when formal care set-ups for older grade schoolers can be replaced with playing at friends’ houses after school and a more flexible work schedule for me. So, what kind of pie piece do we want to replace that shrinking piece with? How do you want to see your financial pie evolve over living your life?

Perhaps today it’s easy to feel like you don’t have quite enough money. But someday you’ll likely have more. Great. But what for?

We’re making do just fine paying 14% to childcare currently, so letting that 14% just fall into lifestyle creep when it’s no longer a part of our budget pie seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity. Drawing out the pie chart of your current financial life coupled with drawing out the pie chart of your future financial life 1, 5, 10+ years from now helps set a visual out.

This visual can help guide purposeful decisions about what kind of moves you intend to make when expenses do change– that school loan is finally paid off, the car loan is paid off, childcare expenses just cut in half, etc. Do you want to save money, free up for more spending on a certain interest/goal in mind, more giving, more investing?

Who decides your ideal family budget pie chart?

But before we get into drawing our budget pie charts, I’m sure you may already know there are ‘recommended’ percentages of what proportion of your income should go to certain categories. While I appreciate the intent to try to provide some general guidance for people figuring out how much to spend (or rather limit spending) on their mortgage or groceries, for what person’s life were these percentages created? Certainly not mine.

Just perusing the web content on ‘percent of income for budget categories’ you quickly see things like health costs, recreation, insurance, food, taxes are all mentioned, but none I found in my perusal included childcare (!!). In discussions of childcare elsewhere, a figure gets tossed around that this cost should be limited to 10% of income. I’ve already gone into this topic in some depth, but, in short, I vehemently disagree with that number! Something that is both temporary and an investment in your long term earnings should not be limited to 10%. Some note health expenses should be 5-10%, others lump that into insurance, many include transportation at 10% or more. So even the recommendations vary a bit.

Still, other than some missing a major category for young families (i.e. childcare), it would be easy to think, great, so I’ll plug in these percentages to my income and I’m good to go. Well, as I’ve talked about earlier, cars are not my thing. I’m a very happy camper to drive my 15 year old Honda around, so assigning $1,000 of our monthly cash flow to ‘transportation’ is definitely not in line with my values and priorities.

Sure, I need some gas and repair money, but definitely not $1,000 per month worth! I guess my husband might be happy to buy a veeeery nice new car, but I’ll just not make a point to mention this figure to him (shh). The point is, I want you to throw out this guidance! Think about what is important or necessary to you in the context of your current life to create what your pie should look like.

New year, new pie chart

Doing this thinking at the end of the year is ideal because you can reflect on the past year’s distribution of your take home pay spending as a starting point to plan for next year. Think to yourself, when you do this exercise in December a year from now, what do you want your budget pie summarizing next year to look like? What things do you aim to change in this new year to make the next pie look differently one year from now?

Let’s start with where we are today. Take your high level budget, the amounts of each main bill (these should be the fixed, non-discretionary items in your spreadsheet): mortgage/rent, utilities/phones, insurance, childcare, and any others, as well as your debts (e.g. student loans, car loans, credit card debt), your discretionary spending cap, and saving target. If you haven’t done this, before check out this post to help you seamlessly establish your monthly numbers.

There’s no need to make this a mathematical masterpiece so go ahead and just draw something by hand in your planner, journal, wherever you like to do your doodling. (Personally, I fill these awesome graph paper notebooks with all my doodles- not only do they have double sided graphing lines, but the paper is super smooth and thin. Love them!)

How to make a pie chart (free) online

You can also use the free pie chart maker tool from Canva (scroll down this page to see where to pull in the pie chart feature). Make big-picture categories that fit into the context of your life, lumping things together where that makes sense to you, separating pieces out that you feel need separate attention. For example, I put all spending as one category. But you could separate out groceries (or Lego sets) if you wanted to keep a closer eye on any particular important or problem categories. Be thoughtful about how you divvy up to make a good big-picture visual of what your total annual income is doing.

But if you aren’t a binge clothing shopper, there’s no reason to pour over your account statements for the past year finding all your clothing purchases just because other people budget that separately. Think about what is relevant for your family. (I should probably have a separate pie wedge for Home Depot, come to think of it.)

For each pie wedge category on your list, calculate how much you spend as a percentage of your income annually (for example, $12,000 per year towards mortgage / $50,000 per year take home pay = 0.24, or 24%). Then type in those categories and percentages to the Canva tool.

Here is our most recent year’s pie:

financial planning for young families — Past year’s distribution of spending – What would I like to change for the upcoming new year?

Evaluate & determine your ideal future pie chart

What stands out to me is how few categories there really are in our present life, now having no non-mortgage debt… and that our giving is smaller than we’d like for this past year. There are reasons for that, but still it’s something we’d like to be higher in the new year. So right there by pie-charting this out I can easily see a place I want to change. I can also see our discretionary spending seems a little out of whack for the lifestyle we intend to lead. Time to start paring that down by more carefully controlling day to day spending as we simplify life a bit.

Granted, our ‘discretionary spending’ wedge there includes gas (“transportation”), groceries & other food spending, entertainment, etc that tend to be separated out in others’ recommended budget percentages. But that teeters on categorized budgeting, which I am not all about!

Again, setting some amount I should spend, whether it be on my mortgage or my shoes just doesn’t sit well with me. Set up the big-picture pie that fits your situation and your future goals.

Then learn the skills or create the additional income to move towards your more ideal pie proportions, whether it be through adding $500 per month to your income with creative ideas, more frugal food spending or finding the right home size (and, with it, mortgage) to fit your ideal budget pie.

Draw a few more circles and play around with what the ideal proportions look like for the life YOU want to be living. At a minimum, make your tweaks for how next year should look, to be making progress towards your best life picture. For example, just a few tweaks and here is how I’d like our 2021 pie to look (barring major changes in income where we’d readjust):

Though I didn’t change much, I now see I want to tighten our discretionary spending cap by about 4% of our total take home pay. That gives me a precise target that’s easy to immediately implement- without analyzing all our purchases over the whole past year. Just a new discretionary spending cap to get comfortable with. For us this will largely be in the form of conveniences that we used a lot early in the pandemic (i.e. grocery delivery) and continuing to improve simple cooking at home. Recently, I got cooking more because we did the Whole 30 together- and the only way to do that well is to cook (from scratch) a lot. It kind of got me over my mental block of prepping vegetables and cooking regularly.

So, there we go! Some simple pie charts and already some clear plans for tweaking things in the new year. This is the kind of routine personal finance maintenance you will do once you have established smart financial goals with a long term plan in motion.

Visual planning for the long term

As a part of your process of developing your vision for your family, make these family money pie charts for down the road 5 and 10+ years, or make them for certain milestones you anticipate. For instance, current pie chart, pie chart after completing post-grad training, pie chart after baby comes, pie chart when we buy a house, pie chart for when we hit the road in our RV and live on the road, etc. It won’t be exact, but it will give you a visual idea of where you want to be going with your financial planning. Draw out how you will use money to create the life you intend to be living.

Do you enjoy a good pie shaped visual to tweak your financial picture? If you make a family budget pie chart, share it with me on Pinterest (@familymoneymentor) or Twitter (@FamMoneyMentor)!