Score your finances out of 100

Why the weights are what they are

Every scoring system encodes an opinion. Here is ours, stated so you can disagree with it.

Emergency savings gets the largest single weight, 25 points, because cash on hand is what converts a bad month into a manageable one. Almost every financial disaster that starts small — a car repair charged to a card, a missed rent payment, a payday loan — starts with not having a few hundred dollars available. Nothing else on this page protects you as broadly.

Debt-to-income takes 20 because it's the constraint that decides what you're allowed to do next: refinance, move, buy a car, take a lower-paid job you'd rather have. Retirement contributions also take 20, because the cost of a missing decade of compounding is not recoverable by working harder later. Those three components — cash, debt load, retirement — are 65 of the 100 points, and that ratio is deliberate.

Card utilisation gets 15. It's a smaller weight than the others because it's a symptom more than a cause, but it's here because it moves your credit score faster than anything else you control, and your credit score sets the price of every dollar you borrow.

Insurance and estate paperwork share the last 20 points. They score low in most people's minds and get skipped, which is exactly why they're in here. Their failure mode isn't gradual — an uninsured disability or a will-less death does damage that no savings rate compensates for.

How each component is calculated

The formulas are in the table above, applied literally. Emergency savings is your cash divided by monthly essentials, divided by six, times 25. Debt-to-income is a straight line from full marks at 20% down to zero at 50%. Utilisation runs from full marks at 10% down to zero at 60%. Retirement is your contribution rate divided by 15%, times 20. Insurance is four yes/no answers at 3 points each. Estate is two yes/no answers at 4 points each.

Worked example with the page defaults: $5,200 in cash against $3,400 of monthly essentials is 1.5 months of coverage, so the emergency component earns 1.5 ÷ 6 × 25 = 6.4 of 25. Debt payments of $2,050 against $6,200 gross is a DTI of 33.1%, giving (50 − 33.1) ÷ 30 × 20 = 11.3 of 20. Cards at $3,800 against $14,000 of limits is 27.1% utilisation, giving (60 − 27.1) ÷ 50 × 15 = 9.9 of 15. That kind of profile — decent income, thin cushion, moderate card use — lands in the Building band, which is where most working households actually sit.

What a score of 100 does not mean

It doesn't mean you're wealthy. Someone earning $38,000 with a paid-off car, six months of expenses saved, no card balances and a 15% retirement rate scores near the top. Someone earning $300,000 with two leased cars, a maxed card and no will scores in the forties. That is the point — this measures how your money is arranged, not how much of it there is.

It also doesn't account for anything about your actual life. A 90 with a chronic illness in the family and a 90 without are not the same 90. No calculator will ever know that, which is why the output here is a diagnostic pointing at two components, not a verdict.

What this score ignores

Home equity, investments outside retirement accounts, business ownership, expected inheritance, pension entitlements and Social Security are all absent. So is your job security, your health, your housing stability and whether you have family who could help. Several of those matter more than anything on this page.

It also can't see debt structure. Two people with identical DTI, one carrying a 3% mortgage and one carrying a 26% card balance, score identically here and are in completely different situations. If that's you, the debt payoff calculator is the more useful page.

And it treats employer-provided life and disability cover as equivalent to a policy you own. It isn't — group cover usually ends when the job does, often at exactly the moment you'd need it. Score the point, then go find out what your policy actually pays and whether it's portable.

What to do with the result

Don't try to raise the total. Pick the lowest-scoring component and do one thing about it this month. Scores respond to single fixes far more than to broad effort, and the two components the page flags are chosen by percentage of available points, not by raw points — so a 4-of-12 insurance score outranks a 14-of-25 savings score as the thing to attack first.

Then put a reminder in your calendar for six months out and run it again. The number itself is worth nothing. The direction it moves is worth quite a lot.