My goal is to save 50% of my income each month and I met that goal in April. I made $3815.80 and managed to save $2000. That amounted to a 52.41% savings rate. I didn’t put quite as much money in savings in April as I could have because I wanted to leave myself a little bit of a cash cushion with the tax job ending and my part-time job not being quite enough to cover my bills. My part-time job has turned into a full-time job so I will be able to decrease my cash a little and move that cash to savings.
The 4% SWR translates into having 25x your annual expenses in savings or 300 months of expenses in savings. I have 24.24 months of living expenses saved now. It is nice to have two years of living expenses in savings. Most of the money is in retirement accounts so it isn’t easily accessible, but it is still nice to know it is there.
The way I am determining my SWR is by tracking my trailing 12 months expenses divided by the amount of my investments. Since I don’t think the preceding 12 months accurately reflect my expenses going forward I am using my monthly expenses starting in November 2012 to set the average so every low month of expenses makes a big change in the average right now.
Do you have a specific time frame for when the 300 months will be saved up?
I don’t have a specific time frame. My progress will be stalled until I get another job that pays well so it will probably be a while until I reach the 300 months mark.
Is 300 months of savings the definition of Financial Independence?
It is one definition of financial independence. If you have 300 months of savings you most likely will be able to live off your savings for the rest of your life.
Interesting numbers there, would be keen to hear more about this SWR – what do you do with your funds within this pool of savings to protect the asset but also earn appreciation – do you have a specific asset allocation strategy for this?
The SWR of 4% is a commonly used as a safe withdrawal rate although there is some controversy about how safe it is with some suggesting the SWR should be 2% or 3% while others feel that a SWR of up to 6% isn’t overly risky.
Currently, I have about 25% of my savings in cash and a TIPS fund and the rest in dividend stocks. This isn’t the result of a specific asset allocation strategy but just how my investments ended up.