How to run a household on a Pakistani salary

Running a house well is not about being careful with small things. It is about controlling five large ones, and having a routine short enough that you actually keep doing it.

Written for Pakistan · Prices in PKR · Updated August 2026

The five lines that decide your month

Households do not go wrong on a hundred small decisions. They go wrong on five big ones, and everything else is rounding.

1. Rent or housing. Set once a year at most, and it constrains every other line for the next twelve months.
2. Grocery. The largest line you can actually change this month.
3. Electricity. Slab-priced, so it punishes you disproportionately at the top end — and it is the line most people believe they cannot control.
4. Transport. Petrol plus servicing plus any installment. Frequently larger than people think, because they only count the petrol.
5. School fees. If there are children, this is normally second only to rent once van, books and uniforms are included.

Get those five right and the household works even if you never track a single chai. Get them wrong and no amount of small economising rescues it.

Getting the bijli bill under control

This is the most misunderstood bill in the country, because it is not charged at one rate. Tariffs are slabbed, and the rate climbs as you use more — so the last units you use are the most expensive units on the bill.

Rates shown include the usual taxes, fuel adjustment and meter charges as one blended figure. The practical consequence: cutting 100 units off a high bill saves far more than cutting 100 units off a low one. If you are near the top of the ladder, small reductions are worth real money.

Where the units actually go

For a four-person household, a fridge is about 95 units a month on its own, a geyser about 55, a water pump about 28, a TV about 25, computers about 35 and a washing machine about 22. Fans, lights and phones for four people are roughly another 380. That is around 605 units, or a bill near Rs 28,600 — before a single air conditioner.

Add two non-inverter ACs run eight hours a day and the same household lands near Rs 50,700 averaged across the year. Swap those for inverters and it comes down to about Rs 42,000. That one substitution is worth roughly Rs 8,700 a month.

The changes that are actually worth making

• Set the AC to 26–27°C rather than 18°C and use a fan with it. The compressor runs far less and the room still cools.
• Turn the geyser off between uses rather than leaving it on all day. It is one of the few loads that runs while nobody is benefiting from it.
• Service and clean AC filters before summer. A dirty unit works harder for the same cooling.
• Replace remaining incandescent and tube lights with LED. Small per bulb, meaningful across a whole house.
• Check your actual meter reading mid-month. Knowing you are at 420 units on the 15th is the only way to avoid a 900-unit bill on the 30th.

Manage the basket, not the number

“Spend less on grocery” is not an instruction anyone can follow. “Buy 6 kg of meat instead of 8, and put the difference into daal and seasonal sabzi” is.

In a typical Karachi household basket, protein is the largest single block — beef, chicken and fish alone can be a fifth of the whole trolley. Fresh food is the next. Dry goods, dairy and household cleaning items follow. Where the money goes:

• Buy the staples in bulk. Atta, rice, sugar, oil, daal and tea are cheaper per kilo in quantity and never spoil.
• Buy sabzi and fruit in season. Out-of-season produce is routinely two to three times the price for no benefit.
• Go with a list. The difference between shopping with and without one is consistently double digits in percentage terms.
• Watch the packaged aisle. Ready sauces, snacks, juices and frozen convenience items are where a basket quietly inflates.
• Separate eating out from grocery. They are different decisions and they need different lines, or eating out hides inside “food” and never gets examined.

Transport: work out your cost per kilometre

Most people count petrol and stop there. The real cost of a car includes servicing, tyres, oil, washing, parking and any installment. At around Rs 343 a litre and roughly 10 km per litre in city traffic, a car costs about Rs 34 per kilometre in fuel alone, and closer to Rs 36 once maintenance is spread across it.

A bike at roughly 40 km per litre costs about Rs 9 a kilometre all in. For a 30 km daily commute, five days a week, that difference is on the order of Rs 17,000 a month — before the installment on a financed car.

This is not an argument for everyone to sell their car. It is an argument for knowing the number before you decide.

A 20-minute monthly routine

Systems that take an hour a week get abandoned. This one takes twenty minutes a month and is enough.

1. On salary day (5 minutes). Move the savings amount out first. Pay the fixed bills. What remains is what you have, and you can stop doing mental arithmetic for the rest of the month.
2. Mid-month (5 minutes). Check the electricity meter and the balance in the spending account. These are the two numbers that predict a bad month early enough to do something about it.
3. End of month (10 minutes). Compare what you planned against what happened, on the five big lines only. Adjust next month's plan towards reality.

That is the whole system. Nobody needs to log a Rs 200 chai.

Talk about it at home

A budget that one person is quietly maintaining does not survive contact with a household. The people who share the house are the people making the spending decisions, and they cannot make good ones without knowing the numbers.

You do not need a monthly finance meeting. You need everyone to know roughly what comes in, what the five big lines cost, and what this month's plan is. That alone prevents most of the arguments that money causes, because the arguments are usually about surprise rather than about spending.

Questions people actually ask

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