How to Calculate Enough for a Family

In How Much Is Enough? we asked why the question is so hard to answer. This post is the practical half. It sets out a way for a family to work out its own enough, write it down, and use it.

Two things first. This is not a way of telling anyone to want less. If your family lacks food, a safe home or care, the calculation will show that clearly, and that is part of its purpose. And the figure is yours. Nobody else can tell you what your enough is, and we won’t try.

This may sound like budgeting with a new name. It isn’t quite. A budget asks how to fit spending inside income. This method asks what the family actually needs, before income comes into it at all. Income only appears in step 5.

Step 1: Separate the two kinds of need

A human being has two kinds of need. The body’s needs are physical, limited, and can be counted: a body can only eat so much, wear so much, sleep in one bed at a time. The self’s needs are different: to feel secure, respected, settled, happy. No quantity of things can meet those.

Only the body’s needs go into the calculation. The self’s needs get a list of their own, in step 6. Mixing the two is why the figure never settles: we try to pay for peace of mind with things, and the number keeps rising.

Step 2: List the body’s needs in eight lines

Madhyasth Darshan groups the physical things a human being uses into two sets of three. The first set it calls ordinary needs. The second it calls ambitious needs, which extend a person’s reach beyond where they stand.

• Food (आहार): what the household eats and drinks, including cooking fuel.
• Home (आवास): shelter, its upkeep, water and power.
• Clothing and care (अलंकार): what we wear, and keeping the body clean and cared for.
• Travel (दूरगमन): getting to work, school, family and the places life takes us.
• Communication (दूरश्रवण): phones and the means of staying in touch.
• Seeing at a distance (दूरदर्शन): screens, media, the internet, what lets us see beyond where we are.

Most families will want two more lines: health, for care in illness, and tools of work and learning, for what each person needs to do their work and keep learning. Eight lines in all. If something you spend on doesn’t fit any of them, put it aside for step 6.

Step 3: Put a yearly figure on each line

Start with what you actually spent last year, line by line. Bank statements help. Then go through each line together and ask one question: how much of this did the body use, and how much was for something else?

Madhyasth Darshan distinguishes use (उपयोग) from good use (सदुपयोग). Food that was eaten is use. Food that was thrown away, or bought to cheer someone up, is something else. A family might find that it bought thirty pieces of clothing last year and regularly wore twelve. That doesn’t mean the other eighteen were wrong. Some may be for winter, a wedding or a job interview, and those are needs too, just occasional ones. But some were answering a different question.

Write the figure for what the body needs, not what was spent. Round it honestly. This is the heart of the method, and it takes more than one conversation.

“You will know you are rich when you can say how much is enough.”

Step 4: Add a reserve, and give it a number

Illness, repairs, a lost job, old age: some needs are certain to arrive even though we don’t know when. A family needs a reserve for them.

The difference is that the reserve gets a number too. Decide together what it should cover, and for how long. “As much as possible” is not a reserve. It is fear, and fear has no ceiling. A reserve with a number is a plan, and a plan can be reached.

Step 5: Compare with what the family produces

Add up the eight lines and the reserve. That is your enough. Now set it beside what the family produces in a year: income, but also what you grow, make, repair and do for each other that you would otherwise have to buy.

• If production is below enough, the lack is real, and now it has a size. That is the starting point for working on production, on fairness at work, or on asking for help without shame.
• If production meets enough, the family can stop running and start choosing.
• If production is above enough, you have a surplus. This is what Madhyasth Darshan calls prosperity (समृद्धि): producing more than you need, consuming less, until there is no sense of lack left.

A surplus raises a new question: where should it go? The darshan’s answer is that prosperity is complete only when it reaches every family, through each family complementing the others (सर्वसमृद्धिकरण). Some of the surplus may go to relatives, neighbours or the village. Some may go back to the land. What it doesn’t have to do is turn into more consumption.

A worked example

Every number here is made up, for a family of four, to show how the pieces fit. Yours will look nothing like it, and that is the point.

Three things to watch for. Things that last several years, like the laptop, go in at their cost divided by their life, so they aren’t counted all at once. The reserve line holds only what you add this year; money already saved is not income. And what the family grows or makes for itself is counted once, on the production side, not also as a need. If you disagree about a line, write both figures down and come back to it next month; the disagreement is useful information too.

Step 6: Write the second list

Now take everything you set aside: the things you want that are not on the eight lines. Next to each one, write what you hope it will give you. Security? Respect? Rest? Belonging?

This list can’t be settled with money, however large the surplus. It can only be settled with understanding and with relationships: knowing ourselves, and being at ease with the people around us. That is the work of the rest of this website. For now, it is enough to see the list clearly, and to stop trying to pay for it with the first.

Then put a date in the calendar a year from now, and do it again. Families change. The figure should change with them.

What changes once it is written down

Conversations about money get calmer, because there is something to check against. Each purchase has a simple question attached: is this inside our enough, or beyond it? Advertising loses much of its grip, because it works by making enough look insufficient, and you now know what yours is. And the fear underneath a lot of ambition has less to feed on, because the reserve has a number.

And the planet?

Every one of the eight lines is drawn from the earth. Food from soil and water, homes from clay, stone and timber, phones and screens from minerals and energy. A family that knows its enough uses a known amount of nature. A family that doesn’t has no limit, and most of the economy is designed to keep it that way.

If many families did this, demand would have a ceiling for the first time, and surplus would flow towards those who lack rather than into more consumption. We think this may be one of the most practical routes from a happy family to a sustainable planet. It is a claim still to be tested, and we set out how in One question, not two. The same idea, at the scale of a country, is in How Do We Measure Progress?

A protocol to try

Don’t try to do all six steps at once. This week, do only the first two steps. Sit down together and set aside anything that meets a need of the self, such as security, respect or peace, for a separate list. Then draw eight lines on a page for the body’s needs, food, home, clothing and care, travel, communication, seeing at a distance (screens and the internet), health, and tools of work and learning, and write one sentence under each about what your household actually needs.

Next week, put figures on them. You may be surprised how short the first list is, and how long the second.

Limitations

• Some costs, such as health care or rent in a large city, are hard to predict and hard to control. A careful figure can still be overturned by one bad year.
• Family members don’t always agree. One person’s need can look like another’s want. The method gives a place to have that conversation, not a way to win it.
• Six of the eight lines come from Madhyasth Darshan. We have added health and the tools of work and learning as separate lines, which the darshan may group differently.
• We have not yet tested this method across many families. If you try it and something doesn’t work, we would like to know.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, समृद्धि (prosperity), p. 191
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, आवश्यकता (need), p. 39
3. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, सामान्य आकांक्षा (ordinary needs: food, home, clothing), p. 197
4. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, महत्वाकांक्षा (ambitious needs: travel, communication, seeing at a distance), p. 145
5. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, सर्वसमृद्धिकरण (prosperity for all), p. 192