Читать книгу Personal Finance in Your 20s & 30s For Dummies - Eric Tyson - Страница 19

To accomplish important personal and financial goals such as building an emergency fund, buying a home, starting a business, traveling, and someday retiring, most folks need to save money. Some exceptions do exist, such as those folks who have trust funds or inherit significant-enough sums that they don’t need to save money from their work earnings. But the vast majority of people must save in order to accomplish their goals.

You can’t effectively save for a long-term goal if you don’t know what your savings rate is. When I worked as a financial counselor and taught adult-education money-management courses (which I now do online), I was struck by how few people knew the rate at which they were saving money. Most people can tell you how much they earned from their work over the past year, but few folks really know what portion of their employment income they were able to save. That’s because to have an accurate idea of this percentage, you really need to do some analysis and calculations. The math isn’t that complicated, but it does require some time and effort, especially if you haven’t been tracking your spending or net worth over the past year. In the following sections, I explain a couple of different ways to calculate your savings rate over the past year.