Sunday, June 23, 2013

How much do you save?

I've been reading Mr. Money Moustache a lot lately. I love his blog and feel like it's really the only PF blog where I am actually learning new things. Anyway, as his readers know, he advocates saving like 50% of your pay. Um, wow. And  I thought I was an aggressive saver!

I've never actually added up about how much I save each month, so I wanted to see what % I save. In various ways (pre-pay mortgage principal, cash direct deposited to my trading account, and cash deposited to my checking account) I save about 15-20% of my monthly income. It's not bad, but it's not great. The only thing that makes me a super saver is my bonus.  I usually get a bonus in December (praise be to the Gods) and it's a good chuck of my income. Last year 50% of my gross was paid out in that one check. And I save the whole thing (except when I spent it on my downpayment for the apartment last year). So in reality I save a lot more than 20%, but I want to try to get better at saving on the day-to-day level. I guess it's just more challenging because so much of my compensation is paid out at the end of the year. It's good practice though for if I ever had to take a lower-paying job. I know I can successfully live on half of my salary and still save 20%.

This month I've been traveling a ton for work which means I save a lot on food expenses. My monthly spending for June had been very low, until I booked an international vacation for December. But the saving wasn't for naught, because I was able to pay for it all out of my salary and not have to touch savings.

I'm curious about doing my networth update for Q2. The stock market was humming until about June. Unfortunately I think I'm going to end up down or flat on my investments for the quarter, and I haven't saved a ton of cash, so I think I'll be below average on my quarterly networth increase, but we'll see.


Monday, June 3, 2013

Boring

I haven't posted in a bit because things have been moving along. Nothing spectacular, except the performance of the stock market. I held out investing my bonus in January, now I wish I had dumped it all into the market and ridden this high. I'm still waiting to see if there's any kind of dip and will invest then. 

I'm still spending too much money on food, but did cut down on lunch spending by going to the grocery store 1x a week and making lunch at work instead of buying it every day. I think that helped offset some food expenses.

I worked out I've been spending about $500 a month on healthcare expenses, in addition to the $200 I put aside in my flex spending. I don't really feel like there are ways to reduce this expense. I'd rather reduce in other areas if I need to.

To date this year I have barely spent anything on clothes. As a result, I feel a kind of pent up demand. I fully anticipate increasing spending in this area in the rest of the year. I had consciously held off on clothing purchases to try to offset my significant healthcare spending.

I'll do a mid-year budget update in early July, along with a networth update.