What percentage of your income do you save?

[benign_user]

What percentage of your gross income do you save?

I count buying down the principal of your house as part of your savings.

[poll id="64"]

[DarrVao777]

Varied depending on where I was at in my career.

Minimal savings in residency.

20% right out the gate as an attending.

Started to bump up to 30% by a couple years out.

Trying to maintain at 50% now. (Oversaving I realize but I do plan to decrease this once I hit my magic number)

My wife and I are very happy with our financial situation currently but it still amazes me from time to time that we are only spending 20% of our gross income (although I'm sure plenty of people make do with even less). 30% goes to taxes (or sadly, maybe even more this year), 50% towards retirement savings. 20% leftover for us!

[MaxPower]

How in the world does one save more than 60% gross income? My effective tax rate is close to 35%, and there's no way my family could live on about 5% of my gross income, unless we wanted to eat nothing but ramen and live with my parents, but if I did that I wouldn't have a family anymore. Even 50% with taxes taken out seems insane.

With debt paydown I am at about 35-40% of gross being saved (once student loans are paid off that will be another $7k per month going to taxable account), and even that seems ridiculously high.

[PhysicianOnFIRE]

FYI, I have an online calculator for this, which calculates Net Savings rate (more useful IMHO) and Gross Savings rate. Mortgage Principal and Student Loan Principal can be counted as Savings.

Plugging in estimates of my numbers, I get a Gross Savings rate of 52% and Net Savings Rate of 77%.

I agree that a Gross rate exceeding 60% would be exceedingly difficult at the high salaries most of us enjoy. My overall tax rate is about 32%. I would have to live on 8% of my salary to have a 60% gross savings rate. As a single person, it would be technically possible. Extremely difficult for a family to do, and entirely unnecessary.

 

 

[Dicast]

My goal has always been 50%.  This year with the wife starting her job I am projecting us to be at 49%.  I can't wait until we don't have any interest to pay anymore and if I can get us up to >60% I'll be very happy.  Part of this is definitely choosing a low to mid cost of living area and having a decent salary with it.

[DoubleMDs]

Gross 40% net 50%. Hope to stay with same percentages soon as income goes up and student loans go away but expenses (bigger family, larger house) go up as well. Thanks for the online calculator PoF.

[FutureDoc]

So plugging in our rough monthly contributions two months into residency I get around 21%, which is better than it actually feels like.

 

The incredibly depressing thing is that after you consider all of the interest currently accruing from my federal loans currently in REPAYE... It wipes out all but about 3% of the current savings.

[PhysicianOnFIRE]

FutureDoc wrote:

So plugging in our rough monthly contributions two months into residency I get around 21%, which is better than it actually feels like.

 

The incredibly depressing thing is that after you consider all of the interest currently accruing from my federal loans currently in REPAYE… It wipes out all but about 3% of the current savings.

Click to expand...

It gets much, much better. I saved next to nothing in residency. I believe my loans were in deferment and forbearance at different points in my training.

When your salary increases four-to-eight fold overnight, saving becomes easy.

Best,

-PoF

[Benjamin]

I really like this post.  It does highlight how the regular users of the forum are a select few who tend to over-represent super-savers. I literally laughed out loud when I saw 40-60% as the highest bar on the graph.  That definitely does not represent the average physician/professional. If I can get up to 30-40% of my gross, I will be super stoked.

 

Unfortunately for me, I am currently at the lowest point in my net worth and savings rate.  I will start my practice next week....finally!

[tex]

Difficult to make a useful comparison given the large SD of gross salaries here. 20% of an employed FP/pedi salary in a large city is a different story than a private practice sub-specialist in a less competitive market.

[Hatton]

My savings rate is now close to zero.  Why?  I am done.  Good Luck.

If you follow the basic WCI rules one day you too will figure out that you have enough and you can quit saving!!

[conniebird]

Jealous of the above 20%-ers, but when I think about where I was less than 2 years ago.... things would've gone so much differently ... for the worse! I'm at about 20% gross 1 year out of residency (emergency fund, retirement accounts, extra student loan payments).

[RogueDadMD]

Are people counting employer match in the % of income saved in this poll, or only "earned" income?

[conniebird]

PEMDoc wrote:

Are people counting employer match in the % of income saved in this poll, or only “earned” income?

Click to expand...

I'm not...that is not me saving money and most employers have a vesting schedule so I don't even count it as part of my portfolio until fully vested.

[DarrVao777]

What match? ?