Key idea
Most people can name their rent and their EMI. The leak is everything in between: small, frequent, and invisible until you add it up.
Your salary usually splits into four buckets. Fixed costs you can't skip, lifestyle spends you choose, money that leaves before you see it, and whatever's left. Here's a typical ₹60,000 take-home month. Yours will differ, but the shape is often similar.
- Fixed42%
- Lifestyle30%
- Leaks16%
- Left12%
The three you'll recognise
Fixed: rent, EMIs, utilities, subscriptions. Predictable and easy to name. Lifestyle: food out, travel, shopping, weekends. Chosen, and mostly fine. Leaks: the ₹150 here, the ₹400 there, the auto-renew you forgot. Individually trivial, collectively a category of their own.
Find your leak
The leak is where "I don't know where my money goes" actually lives. It's rarely one big villain; it's forty small ones. You can't manage what you haven't counted, so the exercise isn't to cut. It's simply to see. Once the ₹6,000 leak has a name, you get to decide whether it's worth keeping. Often half of it isn't.
Finished reading?
Marking this complete counts today, and your streak becomes day 1.