Speaking of finances...

Amanda1443994

How much do you guys delegate to savings every month? Not a dollar amount, but a percentage of your income. FI and I just bought a house and I"m struggling with what my savings goal should be. Obviously, we should save as much as we can. But at minimum, after all bills/mortgages are paid, I'm not sure what minimum percentage I should be shooting for.

Currently, since I don't have any loans or mortgages, I was saving over 65% of my net monhtly income.  This does not include my 'fun' money, retirement, etc. Just long term savings for stabillity purposes/emergency situations/down payment on our home.  Now that we bought our home though, we're obviously going to be saving a lot less and I'm not sure what number I'm comfortable with yet. I know it will be different for everyone, but I'm just curious. I'm not used to paying such large bills every month so it worries me!

brandeeteer

We try and save 10% - it's not much but better than nothing for now. I have a HUGE amount of student loan debt so it's hard to save much more.

LADY324

Right now we are not saving to save we are saving for the wedding we have a lot of money in our savings right now but it will pretty much be depleted the day before the wedding.  However right after the wedding we are putting all of our money that we get back into savings.  We do plan on paying off all of our credit cards.  Originally we were just going to pay 1/2 of them down but we want to have awesome credit scores for when we buy our next house. 

butterflyjumper1

We are going to start keeping a house emergency fund that will be a set amount of $$ per month, along with a "vacation fund" (not exactly savings but kind of ), but we are going to try to put about 20% of our combined incomes into a different savings account that won't be touched.

When I asked a kind of similar question on here about percentage of income to allocate towards mortgages/necessities/etc., some of the girls told me about the 50-30-20 budget. That is what we used to put together our monthly budget once we bought our house.

50%: necessities: mortgage, car payments, loans/debt, phone bills, insurance payments, etc.
30% wants: cable, going out money, vacations, home improvements, fun stuff 
20% goes right into savings

The goal is to crunch down what you REALLY need into 50% in case anything should happen to one of your jobs or your income. It makes sense, bceause a lot of the things that we THINk we need, are actually just Wants (ie cable tv and going out to eat!)

Amanda1443994

Thanks for the advice!

butterfly - Yea we were trying to shoot for at least 20% toward savings (which I hope we can do!). I broke down all of our expenses in a spreadsheet but I feel like there might be so many 'surprise' expenses I'm not thinking of.

Lady - We have a pretty good chuck of money saved now as well, but once the closing goes through, it will be depleted heavily.  I think that's what's worrying me. I've always had a good cushion and now I won't until we build back up.

MeaganR12

Similar situation to lady, most of our savings will be gone after the wedding and we plan on putting money we get from the wedding back into it. My FI also has a lot of grad school loan debt so it's hard to save and we definitely don't have a set %.

toomanychoices17

I save 10% into a Roth IRA and a traditional IRA right now. I'd like to be doing the 50-30-20 suggestion, but I'm paying for grad school and it's $23K over 3 years.  Once I'm done with school I'm going to increase the percentage I save.

KatieK501

The FI and I haven't talked about a % we're going to save yet, but I always try to save as much as possbile, not really work to a certain %.  I currently own my house and have a car payment, so with the wedding spending on top of those, I'm not saving anything right now.  But I always have a base that I refuse to use in my savings for emergencies. When things get settled, we'll be saving to fix up the house, so I think we'll spend as little as possible, and save as much as we can.

arunkumar

I would consider how much your monthly expenses are (mortgage, insurance, taxes, gas, food, bills) and then work toward saving 6 months worth, at least within the first year. When you've reached that goal, work toward saving another 6 months worth in the next year. Also consider what home improvement projects you may do in the next five years and budget for those as well. If saving a percentage helps, then great. But the overall goal is to make sure you have enough savings to cover necessities for at least 12 months and major repairs if something were to happen.

Amanda1443994

In Response to <a href="http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/wedding-club-boards_july-2012-weddings_speaking-of-finances?plckFindPostKey=Cat:Wedding Club BoardsForum:066005ef-215f-48b1-8655-328b41e07c52Discussion:693d8714-7a93-47da-9c3b-5e68d5c6221cPost:51d3baf1-8792-427e-b85e-b75ad8e2e204">Re: Speaking of finances...</a>:
[QUOTE]I would consider how much your monthly expenses are (mortgage, insurance, taxes, gas, food, bills) and then work toward saving 6 months worth, at least within the first year. When you've reached that goal, work toward saving another 6 months worth in the next year. Also consider what home improvement projects you may do in the next five years and budget for those as well. If saving a percentage helps, then great. <strong>But the overall goal is to make sure you have enough savings to cover necessities for at least 12 months and major repairs if something were to happen.
</strong>Posted by arunkumar[/QUOTE]

that is a very good idea. thanks!

michelle11988

We save about 10% of our income at the moment but most of that is going to the wedding.  We are going to keep at about 10% after the wedding and get up to 6 months of salary saved.  Once we have that we will drop down to 5% and pay off student loans faster.  I'd like to get up to 20% within the next 2 years.

littlemoments324

I've also heard that you should have 3 months of your mortage/rent in your savings account...

kimandjosh22

Our financial planner told us we should have 6 months in savings (mortgage payment, student loan payments, car payments, food, anything we'd need to live ) then we can calm down with savings and start investing elsewhere.

We closed on our house in february, be prepaired for lots of extra expenses in the first few months...welcome to homeownership...my dad always reminds me.

we have bought a wet vac, lawn mower, new refrigerator (mad about that one), dead bolts (surprisingly expensive), we've resheetrocked a portion of the basement, and had do do quite a bit of landscaping.  and we consider ourselves very lucky that that is all we've had to do *knocks on wood*

BmoreBride311

We don't do a set % each month. We did when FI and I were both working (about 33% of take home pay, not counting my 401K automatic monthly contributions), but now that he is in grad school, it's better for us to put that income into his tuition so we have lower student loans. I usually get a ~20% bonus each April, so I always throw that into savings, but we are tapping into some of that for his loans and the wedding. After he graduates, I hope to get back into a regular pattern of savings.