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.

New Way of Looking at a Goal

So over the last week or so I've gotten really excited about a new strategy that I can use to reach my ultimate financial goal: to payoff the mortgage. When I first got my mortgage I thought I would pre-pay in order to shave years and interest off the mortgage. So I set up auto pre-pay of $500 a month, which essentially doubles my principal payment to about $1,000 a month. However, I also thought I would pre-pay a big lump sum each January post-bonus/end of year. The more I read and talked to my Learnvest adviser, the more I realized that pre-paying the mortgage is not actually the best strategy.  Instead, I should invest the money. I like this idea because it gives me liquidity in case of an emergency. That said, I hadn't found a way to track how much I would need to save over how long a time period to reach this goal. Then this week on Mint.com I was like "wow, what if I just create a mortgage-payoff goal" which I did. I input my mortgage balance as the amount of $ I want to save for the goal and then I linked all of my non-retirement savings accounts to the goal. I have a balance of about $200K in those accounts. I've got about $329K to payoff on the mortgage. Hence I need to save about $129 to pay this off. 

Then today I started thinking about the power of compounding, because this money is invested. Some in CDs, but some in my brokerage account. Sooooo this Mint goal isn't taking into account investment gains/interest. So with my planned monthly contributions and any investment gains/interest, I should be able to reach my goal a lot more quickly. I have a goal of 10 years right now, but when I play with savings calculators, I can possibly reach this goal in 5 years if I earn returns of 5%. Which is a little aggressive because some of this money is in CDs paying 2%.
Anyway, I just feel much more energized about my savings outside of retirement now, because I am saving for a purpose and each month I'll be able to see, thanks to Mint.com, exactly how much closer I am to reaching my goal.