How much to set aside every paycheck across all your irregular expenses
Your pay schedule
Biweekly (26) and semimonthly (24) are different — match your actual paydays. Leave APR blank for the standard no-interest method (recommended for short-term sinking funds).
Your goals
Add a row for every irregular expense — car registration, insurance, holidays, property tax, vet bills, annual subscriptions. Each gets its own target amount and due date. Mark recurring ones Annual so the fund refills for next year.
A sinking fund is money you set aside a little at a time for an expense you know is coming — car registration, an insurance premium, the holidays, property tax, vet bills, an annual subscription. The trap is having several of them at once: budget for one and the others blindside you the same month, and out comes the credit card. This planner takes all your goals — each with its own target amount, money already saved, and due date — and tells you the single amount to set aside every paycheck so every one of them is funded on time. It matches your real pay rhythm (weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, or monthly) and keeps recurring funds refilling year after year.
Optional: enter a savings APR to switch to the interest-adjusted variant, gap × r ÷ ((1+r)^periods − 1) where r = APR ÷ paychecks-per-year. It lowers each contribution slightly and reduces to the simple method as the rate approaches zero.
You're paid biweekly (26 paychecks/yr) and today is Jan 1. Two goals:
(The tool carries full precision and rounds each goal to the cent before summing, so hand-rounded steps can differ by a few cents.)
For each goal, subtract what you've already saved from the target, count the paychecks left until the due date, and divide. This planner does that for every goal at once and sums the results into one per-paycheck number that funds everything on time.
Biweekly is every two weeks — 26 paychecks a year. Semimonthly is twice a month — 24 paychecks. Biweekly has two extra paychecks. Match it to your actual paydays: weekly=52, biweekly=26, semimonthly=24, monthly=12.
For expenses that come back yearly (registration, insurance, property tax, subscriptions), the planner keeps you contributing at the steady rate (target ÷ paychecks per year) so the fund refills for next year instead of dropping to $0. It uses the larger of the catch-up and steady rates.
Amounts round up to the cent and paychecks-remaining round up to whole pay periods, so you very slightly over-save and hit each goal on or before its date — never under. Rounding down would quietly leave you short.
By default no — that's the personal-finance standard for sinking funds, prioritizing certainty over uncertain returns; the difference over under a year is negligible. Enter an APR to see the interest-adjusted variant, which lowers each contribution slightly.
If you've saved the full target, the gap is $0 — a one-time goal shows "Funded" and contributes nothing; an annual goal keeps the steady refill rate. A past or today due date is treated as due this paycheck rather than dividing by zero.
Yes — 100% free, calculated entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere or stored.
Savings-planning estimate, not financial advice. It assumes you actually transfer the amount each paycheck into a dedicated, separate fund. The default method ignores interest by design — standard for personal sinking funds. Amounts round up to the cent and periods up to whole paychecks, so you reach each goal on or before its date. Periods-remaining uses 365.25 days/year to average leap years; the real number of paychecks before a date can be off by one depending on your exact paydays — treat it as a close estimate. Estimated targets (especially vet bills and home repairs) are guesses — revisit them as real prices firm up (a common home-maintenance reserve is ~1–2% of home value per year). Based on standard sinking-fund / cash-flow-smoothing finance math.
Calculated in your browser. We don't store or sell your data. Not financial advice.