How much do you save?

People here must have a much higher incomes than us or not have a mortgage!

We save $40k per year and I thought that was pretty good!

 

Still have debt, but LVR is low.

I think its dependent where you are with your investments and what cash flow these generate.

When you reach a point where you are living off income streams that cover lifestyle then saving is not that important/necessary because the focus is reinvesting profits and generating more cash flow.

I hope that makes some sort of sense. Also if you have off sets, large cash buffers this can be accessed if necessary and then ploughed back when profits are realised.

Its like a revolving door, as long as you are not going backwards and keep generating profits it should continue to grow each year.

 

Yes, fair enough, I guess it depends on how you look at it. For me it has always been that I'll live on my salary and invest my investment cashflow. I know lines can get a little bit blurry some times and it might not even matter which money goes where, but in my mind this shows the snowball effect of the self perpetuating nature of my investment.

 

Hmm, about 65% at the moment, but part of OS trip spendies will come out of that as well.

 

I just had a look at our PPOR offset account and in the last 12 months, we've saved $38.253.10. Not too bad considering we paid for a wedding and a honeymoon in those 12 months as well.

 

We save around 25% p.a. - but with two kids ;(

We are quite hopeless in terms of managing our expenses

 

We dont save too much in comparison to our income, hard with 1 almost 2 young kids and still trying to find our footing. Plus we always seem to have stuff pop up when we least want it to. $3000 vet bill only a couple weeks ago etc etc. But we are still saving so thats the main thing, doing better then a lot of people I know.

 

I'm currently saving about 75% of my weekly wages (would be more if I could, but doing an apprenticeship so I'm not on that great of a wage). Not paying rent either.
Planning to save up a large deposit for my first PPoR with my girlfriend, then use the equity from that to fund some investment properties.

 

I have different perspective about saving. At the start of investment journey, I always told myself that whatever I earned was to go toward investment, and I can only live off the return of the investment. It was no doubt impossible at the start, but over the years it sort of form a saving habit in myself. I still live modestly now with a wife and two kids, still saving more than 75% of our passive income, and 100% of our working income. Whatever saved is to go back toward investment.

 

Massive effort!

 

Crikey, you probably could've saved double that if you didn't get married and go on a honeymoon

 

Not quite. The wedding was a touch under $20k, but we got nearly $10k worth of presents, so the difference is only $10k. On top of it, the honeymoon was probably roughly $15k. So we wouldn't have been too far off $65k if we hadn't had those expenses. I'm certainly happy with that, especially considering that we're paying $37k per year towards our PPOR (P&I).

 

How did you track that ?

 

I entered every single purchase/transaction I made in a spreadsheet, including category.

 

I have to agree with a couple of previous posts, as you go along your property investing journey and accumulate debt, it is more about buffer than savings from your income, because it becomes less and less meaningful.

What I do is have a number of buffers, with different levels of liquidity:
1/ income insurance (80%), D&DTP insurance for both my wife and myself (about $1M combined for each)
2/ cash in offset account covering 6% outgoings with no rents for the whole portfolio
3/ shares as last resort as my strategy to date is to buy cash index funds when refinancing to control more assets with a bit of diversity

I would not put the sale of a property in the buffer given it takes a couple of weeks to access the cash. And selling urgently is usually a worth result than selling urgently shares which have been accumulated over time as you can slice and dice the CGT.

Ps: I still save about 30% or 60% depending if my wife works or not as still growing the family

 

ANZ Money Manager can do it semi-automatically (semi because there's a little bit of setup in categorising at the start)

 

The money we save each month dropped drastically recently when we moved from working remote and cut back hours. No surprise there, but strangely it was a reality check. Enjoying early retirement and career breaks is great but we can't save anymore. It's definitely given me an even bigger drive to sort out cash flow and equity.

 

wow that's awesome . I have tried but keep loosing track after a bit I will have to make it a habbit more

 

Yep, I think there are some better solutions now. Might have been then too (I knew of mint.com but it was US only)

Was good to meticulously track everything. Insightful and as they say, what gets measured gets managed.

 

I'd like to track every dollar as well, but with four banks and 13 (I think) mortgages, it's just a bit more work than I'm willing to put in.