Savings goal calculator
By the time you know you spent $400 on restaurants, it’s gone.
Most money apps are very good at telling you where your money went. That is a report on the past. The question people actually ask is a different one, and it points forward:at the rate I’m genuinely saving, when do I hit this goal — and what does buying this now cost me?
It is not a hard calculation. It is just one almost nobody shows you. Here it is, worked in full, with real numbers you can follow.
A desktop license you own · runs on your own computer · no bank login required
The arithmetic, worked.
Say you want $10,000 by next December, and $2,500 is already set aside.
Step one — the required pace. You need $7,500 more across twelve months:
$7,500 ÷ 12 months = $625 a month
Step two — the actual pace. This is the number that decides the outcome, and it is not the number you planned. It is what actually landed in the account over recent months. Say the last three months averaged $440. That gap — $625 needed against $440 real — is the entire story, and a spending report will never surface it.
Step three — the honest date. Divide what’s left by what you actually save:
$7,500 ÷ $440 a month ≈ 17 months
So the goal is not a twelve-month goal. It is a seventeen-month goal being described as a twelve-month one. Nothing has gone wrong — you are saving steadily — but the date on the plan and the date in reality are five months apart, and only one of them is true. Closing that gap means finding $185 more a month, or moving the date. Both are fine. Not knowing which one you’re doing is the problem.
“If I buy this now, how much later do I finish?”
The same two numbers answer the question people actually agonise over in the shop.
A $900 purchase is not really a $900 decision when you are saving toward something. That money has to be earned into the goal again, and the only rate available to do it is the rate you actually save. So divide:
$900 ÷ $440 a month ≈ 2 months later
Roughly two months added to the finish date. That is a far more useful sentence than “you have $900 left in this category,” because it is denominated in the thing you actually care about. Whether two months is worth it is entirely your call — plenty of purchases are. The point is making the trade visible before you make it, rather than discovering it in a report afterwards.
You can run this on the back of an envelope in ten seconds, and it is worth doing. What gets tedious is keeping the second number honest — your real pace moves every month, so the answer moves with it.
What GlidePath keeps current for each goal
- Required each month — what’s left divided by the months to your target date.
- Your actual pace — a trailing three-month average of what genuinely reached the account, derived from your own balance history.
- On track or behind — the two figures compared, stated plainly rather than implied by a bar.
- The projected date — when the goal lands if the current pace holds.
- The catch-up amount — how much more per month closes the gap, when there is one.
Nothing here is entered twice. The pace is derived from balances you already import, so the honest date updates itself as the months pass — which matters, because a pace figure you have to maintain by hand is one you will stop maintaining.
An illustration of the figures described above, using the worked example on this page — not a screenshot, and not anyone’s real household.
What this can and cannot tell you.
A trailing average is an estimate, not a forecast. Three months that happened to include a bonus, or a holiday, will pull it in a direction that does not represent your normal year — so treat a projected date as a reading of your current trajectory, not a promise. It moves as you do, which is the point of it.
It also assumes the pace continues unchanged and ignores interest on the balance, which for a short-horizon savings goal is usually a rounding error and for a long one is not. And it says nothing about whether a purchase is worth making. It shows what the trade costs in months; the deciding is yours.
GlidePath shows and calculates. It is not a tax or financial advisor, and it does not tell you what to do with your money.
See it on a household that already has goals running.
The demo opens a fictional household with savings and payoff goals mid-flight — pace, required, projected dates and all — so you can look at the real thing before any of your own numbers go anywhere.
Your financial file stays local by default. Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon) and Linux.