As a household how much are people managing to save?

[Lostsoul121]

With kids? Of course it depends on location (outside or within London etc), but me and DH with young twins are aiming to save around £1000 a month after all bills and personal expense budgets. We live in the Midlands.
I’ll be working part time and he works FT.

I know to even save at all is good in this current environment. I was wondering what other households with kids try to save if they can.

I mean, it’s all so variable - household income, current outgoings, existing savings, life goals etc.

With young twins (2x sets of nursery fees?), £1000 pcm is pretty massive.

Agree it's so variable that it's a meaningless question.

Some people won't have enough to cover essentials at a very basic level.

Some people will prioritise saving over nicer essentials and/or optional extras

Some people will spend all their money and say they cannot save, which may or may not be true.

Some people will have enough to live where they like and buy whatever they like and still be able to save each month.

If you're wanting people to tell you how well you're doing to be able to save so much at an expensive life stage then well done, you're doing great.

Husband and I both work professional, middle income jobs (FT) and have 2 school age children. We have a reasonable amount of equity in our house and make a small overpayment to our mortgage each month, but we can't save anything. We do try, we'll have maybe 3 months where we save a decent amount, then we'll have to dip into it for a big expense. We do have one small car loan (300pm), we don't have foreign holidays or go out for meals etc. We're fine, we're happy and have a comfortable life with everything we need. But there is rarely money left to save. I think £1000 a month is excellent if you can manage it.

We save £2k per month. But we have no childcare costs anymore and have a low mortgage relative to our household income.

Have two teens and 1 in nursery part time. We currently save about 1k a month, but that's going towards things we want to buy.
Next year once youngest is in school, we will be able to save about 2k, maybe a bit more, a month.

I live in a household of one, and put away about -£600 a month in London.

That saddens me as I want my savings rate to be much higher - when I was a lodger it was 23%, and that included partying and travelling.

Now it’s much smaller but living alone is priceless.

Also those savings are just for my house, car and vex money fund. Things like holidays I save separately and don’t include in this total. And the tiny amount I set aside for investing is counted separately too.

This is a meaningless question: people tend to have these conversations either to feel superior to others, or to make others feel bad. It's like those "how did you think you did in that exam" conversations that kids have at school: one person will always come out of that conversation feeling worse. As such it's a pretty pointless conversation to be having. If you want advice on the amount you need to be saving so you can retire with a decent amount of money then go see a financial advisor etc - but, again, that's going to be very different for each person and dependent on a whole bunch of factors.

Aiming to save? I always aimed to save quite a lot, reality was somewhat different

Completely agree with @Caligirl80 and you are not going to get many people posting to say they save £10 per month….

You might benefit from figuring out exactly what you are spending your money on, and on doing some "auto-saving" such that a dedicated amount of your paychecks goes straight into a savings/investment account (you didn't mention what kind of retirement planning you are doing - but suffice it to say that the more you put in now the less you'll have to work in future - speak to a financial advisor about that). Let's give you an example: do you spend money on coffee every day?? So two cups of bought coffee = £7. Which is over £1,800 you could be putting into a tax-free retirement savings account or paying down your mortgage. Same for buying lunch out every day.

Do an honest review of where the money goes - and see what you can cut out and what you can replace with something less expensive. Do you buy brand new clothes all the time? Buy stuff on Vinted instead. Do you have a load of subscription fees or a gym memberships that you don't really use? Cancel them - go for a bike ride or walk in the evening instead etc. etc. etc. It's incredible how much money you can save - and divert to savings - if you do a bit of pondering and also remove potential money from the "spending" pot.

For the past year, I have been using my bank’s round up app, it rounds all purchases up to a pound and you can double or go up to 5 times the amount. Saved a thousand pounds in under a year so far. Also using Premium Bonds and reinvesting.

None. But that is meaningless as Im already financially independent and have adults kids who no longer need my help

We have twins too. Live outside of London, and can save around £1000 on a good month. We both work full time.

We do have very high outgoings – big mortgage, employ a part time nanny and have an old house that requires a lot of spending on currently.

LOL! Exactly right - my aim is to save 3 million a month 😂That superyacht isn't going to buy itself 😂

It doesn’t depend on location so much as jobs, number of kids, stage of kids, disabilities, benefits, rent/mortgage, the amount of savings you have already, what you consider savings (pension?)…

It comes across as fishing for a pat on the back or just bragging. Talking about saving £1k a month is what you do with a very small group of your friends in similar positions. On an internet message board where the majority of people with kids have nothing like that kind of money to save it’s just crass.

You might benefit from speaking to a financial advisor who can give you some info on how to invest in mutual funds with lower risk - for example ones that track the S&P 500 etc etc or are geared to automatically adjust risk over time with a pre-set retirement date in mind (Vanguard for example has those kinds of funds). Premium bonds are all well and good but there return on investment is shockingly low compared to what one would have gotten by investing in an S&P 500 tracker over the same period for 20 years. But it all depends on what kind of risk/reward you are comfortable accepting.

I save around 5k a month both dc at Uni

I totally agree with you. Utterly crass and 1) could be totally made up anyway so just a trolling post intended to cause people to worry about their own situations; 2) utterly irrelevant to what other people should be doing; 3) says nothing about what they are doing with this £1k: if they are putting it into a normal savings account it's going to be worth far less than someone who invests far less but puts it into a retirement mutual fund with better rate of return/dividend payments/reinvestment etc etc.l 4) ignores the potential that people are getting brilliant "savings" via their house going up in value - but of course who knows what that is until one sells the place or tries to access the equity?

People who put monetary amounts relating to savings on sites like these tend to want a pat on the back/props OR sympathy OR to want to feel superior to others. It's all nonsense and utterly a negative exercise.

Hopefully you are putting that into an investment that actually will give you decent returns, not just a bog standard savings account.

I want your salary!

I have quadruplets in childcare and save around £10k per month.

Does that help you?

Just to give this thread some context for people reading it and feeling shit they aren't saving thousands per month.

BBC news recently released an article saying 1 in 10 in the UK have no savings at all, and a further 21% have savings of less than 1000.

So I think you probably know OP than in saving 1000 a month you will be saving considerably more than a lot of people are.

There's no point in threads like this without more context. Eg yes you are saving 1k a month, have you already bought a house or are you saving for a deposit? Are you actively saving because you've been promoted at work and are living in a smaller home and saving for a house move? Context is everything.

Lots of people will struggle to save much at all while paying nursery bills etc but once children are in school will be able to save more. Some people are in careers where the early salaries are low, but prospects improve dramatically later.

Others have been helped by parents with big house deposits so have smaller mortgages and thus are able to save more each month.

Everyone is just doing the best they can.

Dont anyone read this and start beating themselves up because they aren't managing to save so much. If you have more than 1000 saved you probably have more in savings than over 30% of the population.

About £25 a month 😳

Is that savings for everything including DCs and svaing up for things like holidays? £1k a month is good when you're in the nursery stage. We are still in this stage too and we save £1k a month too which goes in to different pots as soon as we get paid, then anything left over at the end of the month we save extra. The pots the money's split into are long term savings, family savings, DCs savings and a holiday pot. We already have our emergency pot complete so don't save into that anymore. In addition to the £1k savings we also overpay our mortgage by £300 a month, so that's something to consider if you have a mortgage.

I am 😂 but then I have recently saddled myself with a massive mortgage.
I had a lot more disposable income when I was renting a tiny apartment but it's worth being broke for the living space