PiggySavings Goal Calculator
Find out exactly how much to save each month to hit a target — a house deposit, an emergency fund, a dream trip.
How this is calculated
This solves the annuity formula in reverse. Given a target, a starting
balance, a rate and a deadline, the required monthly deposit is
PMT = (Goal − P(1+r)ⁿ) × r ÷ ((1+r)ⁿ − 1).
Worked example: reaching $50,000 in five years from $5,000 already saved, at 4%, needs $662 a month.
Your goal
Path to your goal
Hitting a savings target
The calculator solves the annuity formula in reverse: given a target, a time horizon, a starting balance and an interest rate, it finds the fixed monthly deposit that lands exactly on your goal. Even a modest yield — today's high-yield savings accounts — meaningfully lowers the required monthly amount over multi-year horizons.
Time does more work than return
Run the numbers on a $50,000 goal and something becomes obvious quickly: stretching the deadline helps far more than chasing a better interest rate. Going from five years to seven cuts the required monthly deposit by hundreds of dollars. Raising the yield from 4% to 5% saves a fraction of that. This matters because the deadline is usually the variable you actually control, while the rate is set by the market. If the required monthly figure looks impossible, the first lever to reach for is the date, not the account.
The starting balance carries similar weight. Money already saved compounds for the entire period, so a lump sum applied early — a bonus, a tax refund, the proceeds of selling something — reduces the monthly burden by more than its face value suggests.
Where the money should sit depends on when you need it
Matching the account to the deadline is the part people get wrong. For anything inside about five years, capital preservation beats growth: a high-yield savings account or a certificate of deposit, both federally insured, means the balance you see is the balance you get. Putting a house deposit into the stock market and needing it during a downturn is a genuinely expensive mistake, and it happens often enough that most planners treat short-horizon goals as a no-equities zone.
Beyond roughly ten years the calculation flips, because inflation becomes the larger risk. Cash yielding 4% while prices rise 3% is barely holding its value; over a decade that gap compounds against you. Longer goals generally belong in a diversified portfolio, which is what our compound interest calculator models.
What the projection assumes
Three simplifications are worth knowing. The rate is treated as fixed, whereas savings-account yields float and can fall sharply when central banks cut. Deposits are assumed to arrive on schedule every month, so a missed contribution pushes the goal back further than most people expect. And the target is in today's dollars — if you are saving for something whose price rises with inflation, the real cost at the finish line will be higher than the number you entered. For a multi-year goal, adding two or three per cent a year to the target is a reasonable hedge.
If you fall behind
Falling behind is normal and recoverable. Recalculate rather than abandon the plan: enter your current balance and the time remaining, and the tool will tell you the new monthly figure. Automating the transfer for the day after payday is the single most effective fix, because it removes the monthly decision entirely. Freelancers with irregular income often do better setting a percentage of each payment aside rather than a fixed monthly sum — the same total lands in the account, but it survives a slow month.