Do budgeting % breakdowns apply globally?
The exact percentages depend on many things, not just location. For example, everyone needs food.  If you have a low income, the percentage of your income spent on food would be much higher than for someone that has a high income. Any budgeting guidelines that you find are just a starting point.  You need to look at your own income and expenses and come up with your own spending plan. Start by listing all of the necessities that you have to spend on.  For example, your basic necessities might be: Fund those categories, and any other fixed expenses that you have.  Whatever you have left is available for other things, such as: and anything else that you can think of to spend money on.  If you can save money on some of the necessities above, it will free up money on the discretionary categories below.   Because your income and priorities are different than everyone else, your budget will be different than everyone else, too.  If you are new to budgeting, you might find that the right budgeting software can make the task much easier.  YNAB, EveryDollar, or Mvelopes are three popular choices.
it just depends on your situation and sometimes accounting can't fix that.  by mentor pays 35% even though he only goes back to the USA to visit. I go back less than 30 days a year so I can claim I'm a foreign resident but if all my income is in the USA I'm screwed.   I can't even route my income through my wife who has never stepped foot in the USA because we must claim whatever she makes.    US tax laws are so bad that it takes a lot just to get an account with HSBC in Hong Kong At least in the US, many credit card companies offer statements that categorize your spending on that card and break it down by different categories depending on the merchant category code.   Having different cards for each budget category can be a good idea if different cards have different rewards bonuses depending on categories: e.g. this card gives a high percentage back at gas stations, that one at grocery stores, another at restaurants, etc. "Whatever the percentage divisions are, I'm a big fan of keeping things in separate accounts.  This works especially well for fixed bills.  It is essentially a bank account version of the envelope method.  If I take out everything from your paycheck I know is reserved (including reserving savings), for me it is a lot easier to not even miss the money when I'm going towards ""fun"" expenditures - which come from the checking account." Canada does not have a set date on which a (Federal) budget plan is unveiled. In 2011 it was June 6th. In 2012 it was March 29th and in 2013 it was 21st March. I don't understand the logic of converting a cost of funds of 4% to a monthly % and then subtracting that number from an annual one (the 1.5%).  Unfortunately without seeing the case I really can't help you...there was likely much you have left out from above. More moving parts will make your budget harder to keep track of, not simpler. Budget systems like You Need a Budget recommend simplifying your accounts, even if the various accounts give you specialized bonuses like rewards for restaurants or gasoline or travel. The effort of keeping track of all the options and accounts can outweigh the value you get from them. Instead, I recommend using a simple and structured budget system (like YNAB) that walks you through all of the steps toward building good habits and keeping them simple so that you can maintain the habit. I recently made the switch to keeping track of my finance (Because I found an app that does almost everything for me). Before, my situation was fairly simple: I was unable to come up with a clear picture of how much I was spending vs saving (altho I had a rough idea). Now I here is what it changes: What I can do now: Is it useful ? Since I don't actually need to save more than I do (I am already saving 60-75% of my income), 1) isn't important. Since I don't have any visibility on my personal situation within a few years, 2) and 3) are not important. Conclusion: Since I don't actually spend any time building theses informations I am happy to use this app. It's kind of fun. If I did'nt had that tool... It would be a waste of time for me. Depends on your situation ? Nb: the app is Moneytree. Works only in Japan. Im gonna make up some numbers for this teaching moment.  2011: $60,000  2012: $50,000  2013: $100,000  2014: $70,000  2015: $60,000  2016: $75,000  2017: $90,000  2017 is the highest number since 2013. But before we had 2017 data, we only had up to 2016 data. In 2016, 2016 was the highest number since 2013.   We couldn't say the same about 2015 though. In 2015, 2014 was the highest number since 2013.   Such short timetables are kinda ridiculous to even claim. This type of number is only meaningful if its a big number of years like biggest deficit since 1953 (60ish years ago) "You Need A Budget is a nice budgeting tool that works on the desktop.   It is more focused on manual entry and budgeting over auto-downloading and categorizing.   It does support downloading transactions from banks and then importing the transaction files.    You mentioned having ""trust issues"" with a bank and this would be safe as you don't enter your credentials into the app.   It also has a mobile app that works well. Not exactly what you are looking for, but it would work in India and be safe if you have an untrustworthy bank and it would allow you to import transactions." "This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](http://www2.gsu.edu/~ecobth/HMW_PuzzlingMultJobHolding_SEJ_2017.pdf) reduced by 99%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; Just as the United States displays substantial differences in MJH across states and regions, Zangelidis finds large variation in MJH rates across countries in the EU, ranging from less than 1 to 9%.6 Livanos and Zangelidis document large differences in MJH rates across regions of Greece with rural areas with large primary sectors having the highest rates, likely due to low labor demand and weak primary 6 Zangelidis also finds that mean weekly hours on the second job average 12.9 hours across the continent, with little variation across countries.  &gt; A quick glance at state rates of MJH show Minnesota with among the highest MJH rates, while New York has a relatively low rate MJH rate as compared to other northern states.  &gt; Our approach is to examine the extent to which controlling for a variety of detailed worker, job, and city attributes can account for differences across labor markets in MJH. To describe the magnitude of MSA differences in MJH, we calculate the mean absolute deviation of MJH across our 259 labor markets based on estimates from increasingly dense individual worker OLS MJH equations using the 1995-2014 urban sample.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6l4ana/the_puzzling_pattern_of_multiple_job_holding/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~158577 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **MJH**^#1 **Job**^#2 **rate**^#3 **work**^#4 **Labor**^#5" "It's just a rule of thumb, and so it's done from gross to make it easy. If you make $3300 a month, and spent $1000 a month on rent, you're at the limit of what you can afford. It's not like if it's 30.0001% you're screwed but if it's 29.999% everything's fine. Some rents won't include things (wifi, cable, utilities) that others do. Some locations will require you to spend more on transportation. So the real ""ok"" range is quite wide. But if you're at 60% of gross on rent, you literally cannot make that work because after deductions, you won't have any money for food. If you're at 10% of gross on rent, you probably have a lot more money left over than most people." why should I have any bias in favour of my local economy? The main reason is because your expenses are in the local currency.   If you are planning on spending most of your money on foreign travel, that's one thing.  But for most of us, the bulk of our expenses are incurred locally.  So it makes sense for us to invest in things where the investment return is local.   You might argue that you can always exchange foreign results into local currency, and that's true.  But then you have two risks.  One risk you'll have anywhere:  your investments may go down.  The other risk with a foreign investment is that the currency may lose value relative to your currency.  If that happens, even a good performing investment can go down in terms of what it can return to you.  That fund denominated in your currency is really doing these conversions behind the scenes.   Unless the bulk of your purchases are from imports and have prices that fluctuate with your currency, you will probably be better off in local investments.  As a rough rule of thumb, your country's import percentage is a good estimate of how much you should invest globally.  That looks to be about 20% for Australia.  So consider something like 50% local stocks, 20% local bonds, 15% foreign stocks, 5% foreign bonds, and 10% local cash.  That will insulate you a bit from a weak local currency while not leaving you out to dry with a strong local currency.   It's possible that your particular expenses might be more (or less) vulnerable to foreign price fluctuations than the typical.  But hopefully this gives you a starting point until you can come up with a way of estimating your personal vulnerability. In the related Should I have separate savings accounts for various savings goals? I discovered the open source Budgeter courtesy of Richard Donkin. Budgeter accomplishes my aim with a minimum of fuss, and I have found it to be quite usable despite the author's self deprecating comments to the contrary. The chart below was built in about 10 minutes, half the time it's taken to write this post. Budgeter doesn't feature handy abilities like CSV/OFX importing or scheduled transactions, which would mean a fair bit of work for bringing in historical data, and it's expressly not designed for accounting or bookkeeping. However for the focussed application of tracking savings across multiple bucket categories and accounts I think it well worth evaluating. U.S. corporate tax rates are the [highest in the world](http://www.kpmg.com/global/en/services/tax/tax-tools-and-resources/pages/corporate-tax-rates-table.aspx), not the lowest. Politicians often rebut this fact by claiming that the U.S. has a much lower effective corporate tax rate, but they fail to account for all taxes. The marginal effective corporate tax rate in the U.S. is still [much higher](http://taxfoundation.org/article/us-corporate-effective-tax-rate-myth-and-fact) than other developed countries. I've heard many times that large corporations have their accounting departments do all sorts of crazy things to get their tax rate drastically lowered. I'm no accountant, and this is not something I have done a ton of research into, but I did find [this paper](http://www.ctj.org/corporatetaxdodgers/sorrystateofcorptaxes.php#Executive Summary) that states that between 2008 and 2012 the 288 Fortune 500 companies the study looked at only paid an effective tax rate of 19.4%.   Note that the 288 companies selected were selected because of their consistent profitability over that time period.  I am open to the possibility of this study being flawed, but I didn't see anything that jumped out at me.