One Score, Five Real Questions

The Sovereignty Meter asks five specific questions about your financial position and rolls the answers into one number.

Most budgeting tools eventually show you a report — a category breakdown, a spending trend, maybe a net worth graph. What they don't do is tell you whether any of it is actually good. That part's left to you, and without a real benchmark to check against, most people don't have a confident way to answer it.

The Sovereignty Meter is our answer to that. It asks five questions about your finances and combines the answers into one number. Where it compares you with other households, it uses published Canadian data. It recognizes healthy habits. It doesn't grade how much you earn or own.

The five questions

• Foundation — can the picture be trusted? Before anything else is measured, this checks that your income and household type are entered, and that every expense on your Ledger has a Bucket and an expense type.
• Cash Flow — does the month leave you stretched? It looks at what's left at the end of the month, and at your debt payments compared with your income.
• Spend Discipline — is what you're actually spending in line with what's healthy for a household like yours? First, the classic 50/30/20 split of needs, wants and savings, used as a reference point. Then each expense type is compared with published Canadian data for your income level and household type; not a flat percentage applied to everyone the same way.
• Forward Position — are the costs you know are coming covered? Yearly bills are what catch a monthly budget off guard, so this checks that your Yearly Expenses Bucket is allocated and automated at your bank. It also checks that your Permission to Spend plan stays above zero through the year once your commitments are paid for.
• Protection — if something went wrong tomorrow, would you be covered? This checks that your net worth is above zero, that your emergency fund is at your target or on its way there, and that your Buckets are allocated and automated at your bank.

Why five, not one

A single ratio is easy to publish and easy to misread. One score built from five questions is harder to build, and harder to game by accident. If you put too much into one goal and starve another, a single percentage can hide it. The Meter is built to catch that trade-off.

What you get

Where these checks compare you with Canadian data, the source is on our References page: Statistics Canada for income levels and spending, the Credit Counselling Society and the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada for some of the target ranges, CMHC for the debt-to-income line. All five questions combine into one number: your Sovereignty Meter.

What it isn't

It's not a mood-tracking app, and it's not a productivity score chasing a streak. It moves because your actual position moves — net worth shifts, debt-to-income can come down — so checking it daily or weekly shows something real, not noise. But it doesn't ask that of you. The number stays just as meaningful checked once a month as it does checked every week, because it's built to measure where you stand, and how often you look doesn't change that.

That's the point of the Meter. It gives a simple answer to a question most tools don't even try to answer: Am I doing okay?

— The Sovereign Team