The personal budget Sankey: how to build one and post it on Reddit

Scroll r/personalfinance or r/Sankey for five minutes and you'll see it: a flowing diagram of someone's monthly money, income pouring in on the left and splitting into rent, groceries, taxes and — the part everyone's really showing off — a fat green ribbon into savings. The personal budget Sankey has become the community's signature visual because it says in one glance what a spreadsheet buries. Here's how to make your own and post it well.

Why the budget Sankey resonates

A budget is proportions, and a Sankey is the only chart where proportion is the entire point. The width of each ribbon is the size of the expense, so anyone can see instantly how much of your take-home is eaten by housing, how thin or thick the savings stream is, and where money quietly leaks. That legibility is exactly why these posts get upvoted and why people ask each other to make them.

Step 1 — Map your income and expenses as flows

Start from net income if you want the cleanest story, or gross if you want to show taxes as their own outflow. Then list where every dollar goes. A Sankey is just flows with a source, a target and an amount: Income flows into Housing, Food, Transport, Insurance, Fun and Savings. Group the small stuff — nobody needs eleven sub-categories of shopping — and aim for roughly a dozen nodes so the ribbons stay readable.

• Decide up front: start from gross income to show taxes, or net for a cleaner picture.
• Group tiny expenses into one 'Misc' node so the chart doesn't fray.
• Keep it to about a dozen categories for a legible image.
• Make Savings a single bold stream so it reads as the headline.

Step 2 — Color savings green (the convention that pops)

The visual grammar the community expects: savings and anything you keep in green, taxes and fixed costs in muted or red tones, and the income trunk neutral. It's not just decoration — the green savings ribbon is the whole point of the post, so make it the boldest thing on the chart. In MakeCharts you can recolor by asking the copilot in plain English, or set it in a click.

Step 3 — Export a clean PNG and post it

Reddit compresses images, so export at high resolution. On paid plans the PNG carries no watermark, uploads cleanly and reads well on both desktop and mobile. Before you post, blur or round any figures you'd rather not share exactly — many people post percentages or rounded numbers. Then a good title (your take-home, your savings rate, your age bracket if you're comfortable) tends to draw the most useful feedback.

• Export a high-resolution PNG so Reddit's compression doesn't blur it.
• Round or hide sensitive figures before posting if you want privacy.
• Lead the title with your savings rate — it's what the community reacts to.
• Cross-post to r/Sankey if you're proud of the layout itself.

Once it's built, it's yours to reuse: swap next month's numbers over the top and the layout and colors are preserved, so your budget-review posts take two minutes instead of an evening.