How do I calculate my savings rate?

Do you know how much you are saving of the money that you earn every month? Do you save any of the money that you earn each month?

The average savings rate in the United Kingdom is 6%. Only 6%!

Do you save more money than the average person? Do you save less money than the average person? Do you know how much you’re saving?

Your savings rate is one of the key indicators of when you can retire! Knowing this number you can predict how long you have to work in paid employment

Why should I bother calculating my savings rate?

If you say 50% of your income each month then your working career will be 17 years! How do I know that?

Your savings rate is actually far more important than the total amount of money you earn.

Let’s compare two different individuals. The first is a well-paid executive that earns £200,000 a year. They have a lavish lifestyle with lots of holidays and nice cars. This executive saves £20,000 a year.

The second individual is a builder. They earn £20,000 a year working on a building site. They have a modest lifestyle and live within their means, saving £2,000 a year.

Who can retire earliest?

The obvious answer would be the executive because they are saving more each year. However they have a very expensive lifestyle and need far more money to retire than the builder ever would.

The actual answer is that they would have the same predicted retirement date. This is because they are both saving 10% of their income. If we assume that they will spend the same amount in retirement as they do whilst working we can accurately predict when they are able to retire!!

If you know your percentage savings rate you can predict how many years you have to work.

How do you actually calculate your savings rate?

Each month you earn a certain amount of money after tax. Most people spend everything they earn each month! However if you keep some of that money and put it into savings and investments then you have a savings rate.

As an example let’s say you earned £3,000 in a month. If you took £300 of that money and put it into savings and investments you would have a 10% savings rate.

If you took £1,000 of that money and put it into savings and investments you would have a 33% savings rate.

If you took £1500 of that savings rate and put it into investments you would have a 50% savings rate!

The formula for working out your savings rate is
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Monthly fluctuations

Your savings rate might change on a month-to-month basis. Katie and I used to calculate each month how much of our earnings was saved. Then over the year we could calculate an average.

One reason for the monthly fluctuations is down to your spending. Some months you might have more expenditure buying things like glasses or medical bills. Some months you might have lower expenditure and be able to save more. Your percentage savings rate will change with your spending.

The other reason for your savings rate changing is fluctuations in your earnings. If you're self-employed or a company director you probably have uneven income each month. There might be months where you have a negative savings rate because you didn't earn as much and other months where you have close to a 100% savings rate because you had a very good month in your business. In this case once you have a few months of tracking your savings rate you can start to average out over the last quarter, 6 months or year.

Katie and I recommend using a tool like money dashboard (UK), mint (USA) or personal capital (USA) to track your spending each month and to calculate your savings rate.

We then treated it as a game to see if we could continually improve our savings rate and put more of our money into our investments. We were prioritising buying our freedom over buying extra stuff.

Help is at hand – free template

Katie and I have realised that not everyone is like us and has a nerdy love of figures, spreadsheets and data visualisation! As such my wonderful wife Katie has created a template for you to use to help you work out your savings rate.

You can download the template here, input your figures and it will calculate your savings rate for you.

savings_rate_tracker.xlsx
File Size:	21 kb
File Type:	xlsx

Download File

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Katie and I would love to know what you think of the template and if it is useful for you. Please leave a comment below or send us a message and let us know what you think. We just want to help you take control of your finances!

The better informed you are about your spending, where your money is going and how much you are saving for your retirement be better able you are to plan for a bright financial future!

How to get involved?

You may have noticed Katie and I have got very creative recently and are producing more and more content to support you.  

• The Take Control of your Finances course is running From July to September 2020.  You can find out more and sign up if you want to join here. 
• The Rebel Entrepreneur podcast is launching new episodes each week to help you build businesses and make money doing something you love.  You can find it on iTunes here or Spotify here. 
• Sign up to my mailing list to stay up to date with everything we are up to and get the most out of the blog

.Katie and I wish you a wealthy, healthy and happy future.