What percentage of your salary do you save?

[NoEffingWaytoSurvive]

I have finally started saving, currently I am putting 10% away each week, but is this enough? I see recommendations for 20% but this would leave me with hardly anything left after bills etc.

( I saved 0% for years, no judgement from me if the lure of a cold beer in the local has won out-I just want to save for wedding/car/holiday etc etc)

I've saved off and on for years (to go travel the world for 2 years) but started again at 30 with £0. The advice then was half your age when you start as a percent so I save 15%. If I was 20, I could save 10%, 50 would be 25%. It works for me.

I’m saving about 35% just now but that’s mainly due to lockdown and limited opportunity to spend what I usually would.
I am sure as life starts again it will decrease

A top tip from me is to have a standing order to a savings account on pay day then you get used to not having that money to spend.

Then have a reminder set to look at your account the night before pay day and transfer anything that’s left, even if it’s only a few £££

I don't worry about a percentage and just save whatever I won't need to spend in the next month. I buy unnecessaries from time to time but if I am not able to put money by for a bit I stop that.

I spent lockdown paying back debts and now save just over 20% (not including what I put into my pension) but that will change soon to about 10% when I get a car by which point I will have some ok short term savings

There's also about 3% that I put aside for short term things I'm saving for, things for the house, wardrobe.

@Rtmhwales - interesting. In my 50s and save 25%.

I include my pension as a form savings and endowment.

I guess the percentage of your income as long, medium and short-term.

You’d have to have a large income to save an additional 25% as short-term, or just not living life.

Currently around 50% to 60% it’s doable only really because we lived on only DH’s salary for over 10 years. Since I started working full time again I started saving straight away rather than getting used to spending all the extra money. The pandemic has helped too as we’ve gotten use to not spending anything.

Should also say I don’t have much of a pension and have only been paying in for the last two years so part off my savings goes into that too to catch up a bit (although somewhat resigned to the fact the actual final pension will be no where near good enough!)

15% as a minimum each month direct into my pension (and employers contribution on top of that).

In terms of non-pensionable saving it varies each month from 0%-20% depending upon the month.

none, we are living hand to mouth

I've got a regular savings account. The money automatically goes in from my current account every month. It's about 10% of my take home pay.

At the end of every month, I check my account and see how much more I can afford to put in. Usually it isn't much but with covid I've been able to save quite a bit more because I haven't been going anywhere or doing anything.

That doesn't include my contributions to my work pension which is another kind of saving.

About 10%, not including pension.

I could save more but it would mean having nothing spare for holidays, meals out, days out with DS. I want to enjoy life too as tomorrow is never guaranteed.

Nothing except for pension. I have 2 children and can't afford to save at the moment. I would hope to be able to when they're adults but the only way to do it now would be to not allow them to do any activities and I think that activities are important (they do modest ones nothing extortionate).

I save about 30%, but only about 10% is term savings. The rest is in little virtual pots for Christmas, holidays, car related expenses etc.
Anything is better than nothing.

I use YNAB so save a combination of their "goals" where you put in OK I want £300 available for Christmas or whatever, and it calculates how much you need to put in based on the number of months left until December and how much is left to go of your savings goal. I have a few pots like that with dates on - DC birthdays, next time we hope to travel to UK, phone replacement (based on every 3 years, adjusted if they seem to be working fine or starting to slow down etc) and some without dates (computer upgrade, family holiday) And then whatever is left over once I've finished allocating money to everything we need/want during the month.

I found before we did this, "whatever is left over" didn't really work because it's not ringfenced, so you'd end up thinking oh we do have money left over and spend it. When I actually have it earmarked for "Holiday" or "New Phone" or whatever then I really think about where I'm taking money from. Especially since it tells you OK if you take £50 out of this pot it will take you 2 months longer to save up (or whatever).

I also think percentages don't really work for everyone because sometimes your essential bills are much higher than the "suggested" percentages - it doesn't really make sense to me! The 50/20/30 (50% needs, 20% savings, 30% wants) for example wouldn't work for a lot of people if 50% of your income wouldn't cover basic costs of living.

So I'd try and work out what you need to spend on bills and then what you want your fun money to cover and save what is left after that, but drill it down to a figure, so you can take it out first and not let it sit there looking available to spend.

About 70% although most of that is via salary sacrifice to the pension. The rest into ISA and LISA. I have a very cheap house I brought for cash so only pay for bills, food and petrol. My hobby is gardening which isn't too expensive. I also grew up poor so dispute earning a big salary now I have adapted to not need to spend it.

About 30% to long term savings plus 8% pension contribution.

That doesn’t include short term savings for holidays, Xmas etc.

All of it! We've almost accidentally become quite comfortable. We cut our cloth when DC were small to be able to manage on one salary with my PT income being saved and as my hours increased and DC became independent, we don't seem to have realised we could have increased our outgoings. We could have moved house, had fancier cars or holidays but we never wanted them.

Which is just as well because, due to illness, it looks like I'll soon be the sole earner. Then very little will be saved.

When I say all of it, what I really mean of course is 50% of mine and 50% of DH's, it's just that mine goes straight into savings, a throwback from when I was PT.

36% plus pension.

About 25%, dp saves similar. We're going to retire soon so trying to build a final cash reserve on top of rental properties, pensions and maximum premium bonds. Savings accounts are dire though.

It depends if you mean savings you don’t touch no matter what, or savings you can spend on big things. I save 50%+ of my wages (DC grown up so it’s just me). But then I will also then spend a chunk on a big holiday or doing up the house.

The savings I don’t touch are 3 months living expenses. But then I’m in SH so it’s different. If I became long term unemployed and had for example 50k in the bank, I’d have to live on it till it went below a certain threshold, before I could claim housing benefit etc. So it would kind of count against me.

3 months covers me for any short term unemployment without needing to claim anything from the government. I’m a contractor so sometimes have a month or two between contracts. I’d only become long term unemployed though serious illness as my field of work is always short staffed. I just have to hope that doesn’t happen!

We manage our finances jointly, so it’s 27% of our joint take-home income. It’s split into different pots eg emergency fund, holidays, Xmas.
I have a non-contributory pension but I also do voluntary salary sacrifice of 6%.

At the moment I'm saving just under a 3rd, but it's not always been that way. Once I got to a place where I was financially secure, whenever I got an increase in wage I saved rather than spent. But it came with codes, one car rather than two, one holiday rather than several, we don't buy a lot of things generally. My prize is really retirement and that motivates me.

Currently 75% including pension. That’s in short term (holidays etc) long term and Vanguard account. It’s only this high as I recently started full time job after 15 years working part time so my wages are just extra as we have always lived off husbands salary only.

Percentages are fairly meaningless. As you have found, if you don't have much spare money, you can't save a certain percentage.

Also , different people count savings in different ways. Some people might count savings as any money they don't spend in a particular month, other only the money that isn't ear marked for annual and irregular expenses like insurances, Christmas, car tax, holidays etc etc.

All you can do is maximise your income, minimise your essential expenses and think carefully before spending on non essentials, to tip the balance as far as possible for your circumstances to increase the amount you save.