Activity - personal budget and repayment calculator

To update your personal budget you will need to know how much you should repay to each of your creditors.

Firstly, you will have to identify which of your debts are most important. These are the debts that you should tackle first because if you fail to repay these you might have to face severe consequences (e.g. the loss of your home, disconnection of gas or electricity, etc.). In order to start repaying your debt, you can contact the creditors of your priority debts and renegotiate your repayments.

After you have taken care of your priority debts, you can start to allocate the money you have available fairly to your remaining creditors. A good way to do this is to allocate the money to each creditor on a pro rata basis. Pro rata means that you allocate the money to each creditor proportionately to the total amount of your debts.

This is how it's done:

• Add up all the debts, to give the total amount you owe.

• For each creditor, multiply the money you have for credit debts by the total debt for that creditor.

• Divide the result by the total amount of all your debts.

• The result is the repayment for that creditor.

Tip: Use either all monthly figures or all weekly figures. To change a weekly figure to a monthly figure, multiply by 52 and divide by 12. To change a monthly figure to a weekly figure, multiply by 12 and divide by 52.

The repayments calculator will do all the hard work for you! Just enter the amount you have available to repay debts, your creditors' names and the total amounts of the debts in the columns below, click the Calculate button, and it will work out the repayments for you. The calculator also converts weekly amounts to monthly and vice versa, so make sure you put them in the right column. ( Note: you can use a mixture of weekly and monthly amounts.)

All the repayments can be calculated automatically. However, if you wish to fix the amount of a particular payment, type the amount in the weekly or monthly column.

If you are struggling with debt, you can seek further support from an advice agency such as Citizens Advice or National Debtline.