Money saved per month?

[Newbie1999]

Looking at our finances to see what we can afford house/mortgage wise, and feeling a bit nervous about the amount of money we’ll be saving each month after mortgage/bills/spending allowance. Think it’ll be about £400ish (it’s currently over £2k). When we buy, we’ll be saving from scratch again. With 2 kids it’ll be a bit scary for me having not much rainy day money for a while.

How much money do manage to save per month?

Generally save between £10k - £15k per month depending on how much claret I buy in the previous 4 weeks

Wow, some people are able to save a lot. Most of our money goes on mortgage and bills. I think £400 is a good solid amount though, it will soon build up.

We save £300 a month for "savings". We have separate pots for short term saving like holidays and annual bills.

We were saving £500 a month but the interest rate on our mortgage is more than we get on our savings so we decided to overpay the mortgage by £200 a month.

We moved house in July and have a much bigger mortgage though still some savings left but we are trying to build them back up.

I currently bring home £1600 a month and save about £600

I’m mortgage free however. If I wasn’t then that would almost all be gone and I’d be lucky to save £100-£200 a month

Decide on an amount slightly more than you think you can save each month and set up a regular payment. I do this and very soon acclimatised to having less in the current account. Some months I need to pull it back but others I can even add a bit more on top. It's a great feeling to see if mounting up.

@ilovesooty

Everyone is so different in their circumstances. There will be posters saving greater amounts than other posters even earn.

This

I don't need to save anymore as early retired with a good work pension now after yonks of hard work!

But I always saved something every month by DD to a savings account. If I needed to raid it I did, mostly for frivolous holidays but life is short isn't it?

Just getting into the habit of saving is good. I don't save anymore, but have nowhere to spend anything now anyway with this blasted pandemic.

Usually £200 per month at the minute with not going anywhere, holidays, eating out etc around £400-£500 per month.

Can do a grand on a good month, but some is short term as house needs tlc.

I think threads like this are pretty pointless tbh, it's all relative. Someone earlier said they have saved £25K since the first lockdown, I don't even earn that much per year and still have a mortgage/bills to pay so could never save anywhere near that amount. Saving £100pm is a good month for me.

I'm not naturally a saver but have a small cushion in the event of any significant household emergency. Equally I have good pension/sickness provision so don't need to factor that in. However I do wonder what you're all saving for. I know it's horses for courses and it's your money but so many people die with huge sums in the bank but have deprived themselves of nice things and holidays for decades.

I'm not saying any of you are like that but I definitely prefer to live in the moment. So pay what you have to, keep a bit back for a rainy day but enjoy the rest. See the world, eat and drink nice things, buy decent (but not necessarily extravagant) quality.

@HalfGirlHalfCake

Generally save between £10k - £15k per month depending on how much claret I buy in the previous 4 weeks

Gosh what do you do as a living!

Figures and percentages are all pretty meaningless, especially when people are in different life stages, income security or have different definitions of 'savings'.

Some people count savings as any money they don't actually spend that month, others only count the money that is being saved for no specific purpose other than dire emergency like loss of income or 'just because'.

It's important to distinguish between these two categories, because in the short to medium term, you'll need money for things like birthdays, Christmas, insurance, holidays (hopefully!) replacement of white goods, car repairs and replacement, boilers etc etc so you need money put aside for these, or enough slack in your day to day budget to cover them, before you consider any spare money you have as 'real' savings.

These threads always make me feel like rubbish but to hopefully make others like me feel less rubbish I’ll be honest and say we don’t save anything. We have a couple of thousand as rainy day money in case something in the house was to go very wrong but that’s about it. We have 2 under 5s, a fairly significant mortgage and DH pays child maintenance for his older child. We put money aside for Christmas and holidays each month but obviously that then goes on those things. Every time I think about saving money something comes up like car servicing, a wedding, a hen do, a piece of furniture needs to be replaced.
For people who save a lot I often wonder what they’re saving towards, a rainy day or something specific in the future?

Should recommend an app called plum. It analyses your spending and takes a tenner here and there where you can afford it. There’s £700 in there with me barely noticing it. Maybe taken 6 months. In addition to my other savings.

Nothing atm as my earnings are down due to covid. Normal times approx £500pm. Luckily we have decent savings anyway but I would save up for hols & extras. Just can’t do that right now.

About €100-200, if you count everything so Christmas/birthday funds, saving up for specific short term things like school trips, replacing furniture or appliances, etc.

Emergency fund tends to get about €10-20 top up. Has fuck all in it. I just try to make sure it's a positive number ie more going in than taken out.

This is an improvement as in the past we would not save anything at all and just have to pay for whatever that month's "one off" expense was whether it's a drive home, Christmas, kids birthday, school uniform replacement etc. Now I've realised a lot of that stuff is predictable we're trying to predict and save for it in advance but it tends to be a lot of let's fund this and ignore that for now, so most things get funded very late but it's better than it was previously.

In terms of joint commitments we save very little. £50 per month for Christmas. £80 per month for DS to go to a special camp next year (fingers crossed)
We overpay our mortgage mainly that would be the only money we had available to save or if things got tough it will be one of the first things to go.

We save £20 x 2 for our DC into a pension.

Our pensions come out of our income before they even hit the bank so we are saving for those but it doesn't feel like it

Then we each save from our own disposable income.

I don't know how much my DH saves and I save an extra £40 into a pension and maybe £100 if I have it spare at the end of the month.

Our main focus is paying off the mortgage and paying into our pension.

@notdaddycool I have heard about the Plum account, but how does it know that you're not about to draw out a few hundred pound say for a new hoover or whatever then that would just be an inconvenience wouldn't it ?

We were in the same situation as you. we were saving £1500 - £1800 a month each as our rent was only £1500 a month and bills were low and then bought a house with a mortgage of £2200 a month and bills increased considerably. We’re in the SE so didn’t really have an option other than just not buy.

Exactly what BarbaraofSeville said. People will mean different things by 'saving'. Then some people will be paying into pensions which others won't. Some will be paying more than the minimum off their mortgage. Some will be deliberately having a year of 'no spends' in order to save for something specific such as a deposit. Some will be paying out for childcare, which can be eye watering.
Ironically, some will reach their highest earning potential around about the time they are no longer paying for a mortgage and are no longer supporting dc, so then suddenly - at the time you least need it - you have a huge amount to save each month.

Everyone's circumstances are so different, it really is a bit pointless to compare.

@HalfGirlHalfCake MN does feel like that sometimes.

About £200pm. I'm a single parent. I could save more but I'd rather get the mortgage paid off or I will be working into my 70s.

At the moment we save about £2k and DH also gets a big bonus once a year but in the past when we were both in lower paid jobs we struggled to put aside £20.

When you buy a house you're always going to lose a big chunk of savings. If you can put £400 away a month though and your jobs are reasonably secure it sounds like you're comfortable. What expense do you actually envisage suddenly coming up?

At the moment you'll be earning very little interest on your savings so while it's sensible to have an accessible fund in case of redundancy or sickness you shouldn't have huge amounts just sitting in an account depreciating in value every year.

@pumpkinpie01 you can set it to take minimum, middle max, can’t remember what they call them though. Want to get some building work so I’ve got it low at the moment. You can also have pockets in the app so you can have one for the hover or emergencies. I put most of mine into funds as I can cash flow most things over a month or two on a card (it also knows my card balance) and cash interest rates are awful and I think I’m less likely to sell funds for an impulse buy, but could if I wanted.

@pumpkinpie01 It also sends alerts saying save £15, although when I click through £15 isn’t an option but it gives you a few options higher and lower. Clearly with a big hill I’d never say yea but in make some voluntary extra payments too.