How the financial health score is worked out

The short version

The score is a number out of 100. It is made of six things, each worth a fixed number of marks. You earn part of each one depending on how close you are to a sensible target. Add the six together and that is your score.

Here are the six, and what each is worth:

Emergency fund, 20 marks. Insurance, 20 marks. Saving ratio, 15 marks. Debt, 10 marks. Goal readiness, 20 marks. Wealth built, 15 marks.

They are not equal, and that is on purpose. Three things lead the card at 20 marks each: whether your savings could carry you if your income stopped, whether your family is insured, and whether you are on track for the goals you are saving for. Wealth you have already built counts for 15. Debt carries the fewest, because a loan being on schedule says more about your past than your plan.

80 or more is Financially Healthy. 50 to 79 is Needs Attention. Below 50 is High Risk.

Meet Meena, whose numbers we will follow all the way down

Meena is 34. She takes home Rs 1,00,000 a month and spends Rs 55,000 on the household. She pays a Rs 15,000 car loan EMI, with Rs 6,00,000 still outstanding. She has Rs 2,10,000 set aside for emergencies, a Rs 25,00,000 life cover, a Rs 5,00,000 health cover, and Rs 8,00,000 invested. Her daughter Aditi is 6, and Meena wants Rs 20,00,000 ready for her education at 18, with Rs 3,00,000 set aside for it so far. She would like to retire at 60.

Meena scores 43 out of 100, which reads High Risk. If that surprises you, good: she saves brilliantly. Watch where the marks actually go and you will see the score is not calling her careless. It is pointing at two specific things.

Emergency fund, 20 marks. Meena gets 10.

One question: if your income stopped tomorrow, how many months could you carry on?

The target is six months of everything that goes out. That means household spending plus EMIs, not spending alone, because a loan repayment does not pause when a salary does. Meena spends Rs 55,000 and pays Rs 15,000 of EMI, so Rs 70,000 goes out every month. Six months of that is Rs 4,20,000.

She has Rs 2,10,000, which is exactly half. So she gets half the marks: 10 out of 20.

Half a cushion is not a disaster, and it is one of the easier things on this list to fix.

Insurance, 20 marks. Meena gets 4.5.

Half the marks are for life cover, half for health cover. You earn the share of each that you actually hold.

For life cover the suggestion is ten times your yearly income, plus whatever you still owe. Meena earns Rs 12,00,000 a year, so ten times is Rs 1,20,00,000, plus her Rs 6,00,000 car loan, giving Rs 1,26,00,000. She holds Rs 25,00,000. That is 20 per cent of what is suggested, so she earns 20 per cent of 10 marks, which is 2.0.

For health cover the suggestion is Rs 20,00,000, or half a year of income if that is larger. She holds Rs 5,00,000, which is a quarter of it, so she earns a quarter of 10, which is 2.5.

That Rs 20,00,000 is our own benchmark, dated September 2026, and not a rule from anybody: no Indian regulator publishes a minimum health cover, and the government's own family scheme is still Rs 5,00,000. We set it there because medical costs in India rise roughly 10 to 12 per cent a year, so a cover that looks generous today buys about half as much treatment in five years. Your adviser can change the figure on any client.

Together that is 4.5 out of 20. This is the area that pulls most scores down, and it is usually the cheapest and fastest to put right.

Saving ratio, 15 marks. Meena gets all 15.

All fifteen marks are for one thing: how much of your income you do not spend.

Take your income, subtract what you live on, subtract your EMIs. What is left, as a share of income, is your saving ratio. Money going into a SIP counts as saving here, not spending.

Meena keeps Rs 30,000 of her Rs 1,00,000, which is 30 per cent. Saving 20 per cent or more earns the full fifteen marks, so she gets all of them.

This is the area people expect to be hard and it is the one she has already won.

Debt, 10 marks. Meena gets all 10.

Two questions here, worth five marks each.

Can you afford it? Her EMIs take 15 per cent of her take-home pay. Full marks come at 36 per cent or under, so she gets all five. One thing to say plainly: 36 per cent is deliberately stricter than what a bank would lend you. It is a comfort line, not a borrowing limit.

Does the loan actually end? Every kind of loan gets a sensible lifespan. A car loan should be done inside seven years. Hers clears in 4.1, so she gets the other five.

A twenty-year home loan running on schedule is fine here. A personal loan still going in year eleven is not. And if an EMI is not even covering its own interest, the balance never falls at all, so that scores nothing until the EMI goes up.

Goal readiness, 20 marks. Meena gets 1.3.

This is one of the three biggest areas, and it asks how much of what you are saving for is already paid for.

Aditi's education will cost about Rs 20,00,000 in today's money, and Meena has Rs 3,00,000 set aside. Her retirement has nothing set aside yet. Put together, and weighted by what each goal needs from her every month, her goals are about 7 per cent funded, which is roughly 1.3 of the 20 marks.

That weighting matters, so here is what it means. A goal that needs Rs 40,000 a month counts for far more than one needing Rs 2,000. Without it, someone could add three small holidays they had already paid for and watch their score jump while the big unfunded goal sat exactly where it was.

Now the important part, and say it to any client who looks upset: a brand new plan always scores near zero here. It is the starting line, not a failure. Nothing has been set aside yet because the plan was written this morning. This is the number that climbs fastest once the plan is actually running, which makes it the best thing to look at together a year from now.

Wealth built, 15 marks. Meena gets 2.1.

The only area that looks at what you already have rather than what you do each month.

It counts only money that has not been given a job yet. Meena has Rs 8,00,000 invested, but Rs 3,00,000 of it is already set aside for Aditi's education and counted under goal readiness. So Rs 5,00,000 is loose. That is measured against her income: Rs 5,00,000 of free wealth is about 0.4 years of her Rs 12,00,000 a year. Full marks come at three years of income held free and clear, so she earns about a seventh of that, 2.1 of 15.

It is not the largest area, and that is on purpose. Money already built now counts for real, fifteen marks of it, but it is still kept below the areas that measure whether you are protected and on track. A pile of money is not a plan. If savings could outweigh planning, a report from a planner would be telling people the wrong thing.

Adding it up, and why the total might look one off

10 plus 4.5 plus 15 plus 10 plus 1.3 plus 2.1 comes to 42.9 on the numbers you can see. Her unrounded marks add to 42.9, and the headline rounds that once, to 43.

Each area on the card is rounded for display, and the total is rounded once, at the very end. So adding up what you see can land a fraction away from the headline. Both numbers are right. Rounding once at the end is the only way the total can be trusted when someone is sitting exactly on the line between two bands.

What Meena should actually do, and what it is worth

Her score is 43, and the report does not just say High Risk. It prints the reason in her own numbers: her life cover is only 20 per cent of what is suggested, and people depend on that income.

So the conversation writes itself. A term policy taking her cover from Rs 25,00,000 to the suggested Rs 1,26,00,000 costs a fraction of what most people guess. Do only that and nothing else, and her score goes from 43 to 51. She moves out of High Risk and into Needs Attention, on one decision.

That is what the score is for. A low number almost never means everything is wrong. It usually means one or two things are pulling hard, and the six parts are shown separately so you can see which.

When some of it was left blank

If an area was never filled in, it is not scored as zero and it is not quietly passed. It is left out, and the report says so on the card.

A blank box is missing information, not a result. Treating the two the same is how a plan ends up looking healthier than it is.

And if the areas covered add up to less than half the marks, no overall verdict is printed at all. You will see the marks earned so far and the words Partial Checkup, with how many of the six areas were covered. Credit bureaus do the same thing with a thin file: no score is more honest than a guess. Serious warnings still show, though, because no life cover where a family depends on the income is a fact, not a score.

Two promises the score makes

First, saving more never lowers your score. That sounds obvious and it is surprisingly easy to get wrong: if goals were weighted by what is still missing, funding one would shrink its own importance and the total could actually fall. It is weighted by what each goal asks for in the first place, so putting money aside can only ever help.

Second, nothing is counted twice. Money set aside for a goal is scored under goal readiness. Only money with no job yet is scored under wealth built. One rupee is never rewarded as if it were two.

The score is a conversation starter, not a verdict on anyone. Fix the weakest area and the number moves. That is the entire point of it.