Читать книгу Investing For Dummies - Eric Tyson - Страница 58

To accomplish your financial goals (and some personal goals), you need to save money, and you also need to know your savings rate. Your savings rate is the percentage of your past year’s income that you saved and didn’t spend. Without even doing the calculations, you may already know that your rate of savings is low, nonexistent, or negative and that you need to save more.

Part of being a smart investor involves figuring out how much you need to save to reach your goals. Not knowing what you want to do a decade or more from now is perfectly normal — after all, your goals and needs evolve over the years. But that doesn’t mean you should just throw your hands in the air and not make an effort to see where you stand today and think about where you want to be in the future.

An important benefit of knowing your savings rate is that you can better assess how much risk you need to take to accomplish your goals. Seeing the amount that you need to save to achieve your dreams may encourage you to take more risk with your investments.

During your working years, if you consistently save about 10 percent of your annual income, you’re probably saving enough to meet your goals (unless you want to retire at a relatively young age). On average, most people need about 75 percent of their pre-retirement income throughout retirement to maintain their standard of living.

If you’re one of the many people who don’t save enough, you need to do some homework. To save more, you need to reduce your spending, increase your income, or both. For most people, reducing spending is the more feasible way to save.

To reduce your spending, first, figure out where your money goes. You may have some general idea, but you need to have facts. Examine your checking account history, online bill-paying records, credit card bills, and any other documentation that shows your spending history. Tally up how much you spend on dining out, operating your car(s), paying your taxes, and everything else. After you have this information, you can begin to prioritize and make the necessary trade-offs to reduce your spending and increase your savings rate. Earning more income may help boost your savings rate as well. Perhaps you can get a higher-paying job or increase the number of hours you work. But if you already work a lot, reining in your spending is usually better for your emotional and economic well-being.

If you don’t know how to evaluate and reduce your spending or haven’t thought about your retirement goals, looked into what you can expect from Social Security, or calculated how much you should save for retirement, now’s the time to do so. Pick up the latest edition of my book Personal Finance For Dummies (Wiley) to find out all the necessary details for retirement planning and much more. (If you’re closer to your retirement years, check out Personal Finance After 50 For Dummies, which I co-authored with retirement expert Bob Carlson.)