Minimum savings per month?

[Anonymous]

What to you is the minimum buffer for your budget? Figure this is the number after you’ve maxed out retirement and college savings (529) and you already have a buffer of, say $1200 for miscellaneous expenses a month (clothes, household repairs, etc.). What’s the minimum you’d want to have to go into savings? Income not the issue here, but in case you insist, figure you make $240 gross.

[Anonymous]

$3k-$4k with HHI of $360k

[Anonymous]

3k, hhi 300k

[Anonymous]

HHI $140k.

My buffer is $100 per month. Anything more than that gets budgeted somewhere.

Retirement, college, and all other savings is a line item in my budget.

Maintenance, clothing, etc is also a line item in my budget.

Currently on my “everything is normal” budget, I save $18,000 per year, plus $4,000 in 529, plus $18,000 in retirement. In my “bare bones” budget, I save $3,000 per year, plus $4,000 in 529, plus $18,000 in retirement. In my “crisis” budget, there is no savings.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What to you is the minimum buffer for your budget? Figure this is the number after you’ve maxed out retirement and college savings (529) and you already have a buffer of, say $1200 for miscellaneous expenses a month (clothes, household repairs, etc.). What’s the minimum you’d want to have to go into savings? Income not the issue here, but in case you insist, figure you make $240 gross.

I dont put money into savings. We have a 4 month emergency fund and that everything else goes into investments.

[Anonymous]

we save about 10k per month on 320 k hhi. mostly because we don't have a mortgage and we are not big spenders.

[Anonymous]

On ~$280k gross income, after paying all expenses and maxing out 2 401ks and contributing to 529s, we save about $2500 per month. Currently I'm splitting it btw brokerage and a savings account, because I want to build up our cash for short term.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:we save about 10k per month on 320 k hhi. mostly because we don't have a mortgage and we are not big spenders.

Dang that is aggressive. Is that 10k *after* 401ks, as OP asked? Or does it include 401ks?

[Anonymous]

Not counting maxing our 401ks (and $$ added to those by my employer but not DH's), we put about $5K per month into a variety of "savings" buckets -- some are intended for shorter term savings (e.g. a future car purchase, home improvements), some for kids' 529 accounts, some general investment accounts.

Income $275K

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:we save about 10k per month on 320 k hhi. mostly because we don't have a mortgage and we are not big spenders.

Dang that is aggressive. Is that 10k *after* 401ks, as OP asked? Or does it include 401ks?

It’s after 401k max contributions. Kids are older thou... even though we are finding out it doesn’t mean they are cheaper than when they were young.

[Anonymous]

I posted this in another thread, here is what we do:

Two workers ~300k gross

-37k 401k
-6700 HSA
-5k Child Care FSA (we pocket and save this)
-590 health insurance
$250,710 taxable

$183,000 net
-42k in wealthfront ($3,500/mo)
-11k in IRAs
-15% ESPP (25k annual max gets hit, we have yet to roll this into Wealthfront and if we spend any of this we wait a year to skip STG penalty)

**kids college is fully funded, no longer contributing to that.
**This is our last year with FSA. We will struggle to even claim the 5K.

[Anonymous]

$375k HHI, save about $6k/month after maxing 401ks.

[Anonymous]

We go with 4k a month at 200k HHI. But we pull from savings for renovations or vacations or to buy cars.

[Anonymous]

$250k HHI -> save $3k month.

[Anonymous]

We make 260k and save nothing outside retirement. College is fully funded.