What percent do you save/spend/invest?
How much do you spend on housing?
I am so cheap. I live off only about 50% of my income. I invest the rest.
My spending averages ~50% of my after tax take home, +/- 15% depending on the month. That’s also after my 401k contribution. Of my spending, roughly half goes to housing (mortgage, tax/insurance escrow, utilities). The remainder just gets saved/invested. This reminds me that I need to make my Roth IRA contribution for 2014 soon.
I notice a decent amount of seasonality in my spending. My “net” is usually a lot higher in the spring, though this year I attribute that to studying for the exam and not having a life, so I didn’t spend a lot. Summer and Nov/Dec expenses tend to be higher because I typically travel more those months.
I don’t keep a monthly budget. I just know I live reasonably enough on the day to day, by buying most of my stuff on sale, cooking my own food, and other such things. This way when I want to take a spur of the moment trip overseas or otherwise go nuts, I just do it.
50% and I spend much more during the summer months. I have 2 weeks of summer where I live.
Mint.com makes is so easy to see trends and have a pretty good idea how much I’m spending and what on. I love it.
When I start my new job next week, and counting the promotion/raise my wife just got, we’re currently making about 3.5 to 4 times what we were making 3-4 years ago. As such, we’re sort of in a weird spot right now. We save around 15% off the top, we’re servicing a few thousand in student loan debt each month, and trying to aggressively pay down any debt we have. Our house payment, including escrow, is around $700 a month on a 15 year loan. We’d like to pay that off in the next 2–3 years before the school system in our area will require us to move(K-8 schools are fine in St. Paul, but public high school in the city isn’t really an option). When my wife was unemployed and I was barely making $40K, we were pretty big Dave Ramsey disciples, at least with respect to debt. Now that we’ve got a much larger income, we’re a little more relaxed on spending, but we still want to be debt free by the time our oldest starts high school. Additionally, we really want to be in a position to cash flow college for our kids, because we dug such a deep hole in our 20’s that we really haven’t started saving anything there.
Ive been hearing about that. Sounds pretty neat. Will have to try.
Um pre-tax I save 20% of my pay in retirement accounts. Then post-tax and post savings, I probably save around 50% which gets invested.
I have no idea what percentage we save as I got married not that long ago, but we max out the 401k (to the extent she can as there are company restrictions around how much she can contribute) and our mortgage and escrow is under 5% of gross income. I have no idea what our net income will be though, since I assume we’ll be r@ped by the marriage penalty.
I also spent a lot of vacations this year, but that won’t be the norm.
I need to marry a chick that makes more money than me. That sounds awesome.
Under 5%? wow
Yeah, I was kind of surprised when I ran the numbers. I should say that I bought the house in 2009 for a good deal and refinanced to 3.5% on a 30 in May of last year. If I could time interest rates like that, I’d be a very rich/lucky man. The house payments would be around or below 10% for either of us individually. Definitely helps with the saving.
@Brain
Wow. The payments on my trailer are about 1/3 of my income. But then again, minimum wage doesn’t buy much.
We really bought more house than we could feasibly afford. We did that because interest rates were at ridiculous lows, and we wanted to buy a “forever” house instead of a starter house, and lose a lot of money on it. The house we have now is the one that I plan to live in forever (or as long as I stay in Midland, anyway). So even though the payment really hurts right now, in 25 years, people will be saying “What? Myhouse is right across the street from yours and I pay four times as much!!”
atleast you have a place to live in Midland haha
Housing for us is about 5% of gross as well. Then a 40/25/30 split between taxes, additional spending and saving. Again, an advantage to being married. As a single income, it becomes much harder to hit those numbers. I’d guess I’d be 40/10/35/15 tax/house/spend/save on a single inxome, assuming my house and lifestyle was the same.
daycare is 20% of our gross. mortgage is 15%. the problem with being married is in the early years, daycare ruins you.
Yeah. If you are married, both with decent incomes, you can just kill it and bank until you have kids.
But then you would have to live with her and only her for the rest of time.
That’s why I think im going to have my wife just quit work for 5 years when a child comes. No point in her effectively getting her wages cut in half. might as well just stay home and cook and clean.