In March I made $2959.78 and saved $2300 for a savings rate of 77.72%. That savings rate is artificially high due to my having some extra money in my checking account at the end of February that was added to my savings in March. Plus I took advantage of two different bonus offers from Motif Investing and Kapitall that added $100 to my savings and will eventually add approximately $100 more. If you would like to sign up for Motif to get the $100 bonus leave me a comment and I’ll send you an email with a referral link. You do have to invest $1000 and make at least one trade to get the bonus. Also, I will get a $100 bonus for referring you.
My safe withdrawal rate decreased to 39.05% from 42.89% the month before. This is the first time I have gotten my SWR into the 30s. It would be nice if I could get my SWR into the 20s before the end of the year. As the SWR gets lower it gets harder to make progress though. I’ll need to keep my income up, my expenses low, and my savings rate high for the rest of the year to get the SWR down to the 20s. My ultimate goal is to get my SWR down to 4%. That goal is probably many years from being met. The 4% SWR translates into having 25x your annual expenses in savings or 300 months of expenses in savings. Once I reach that point I will consider myself financially independent.
I now have 30.72 months of expenses saved compared to 27.97 the month before. Since I am only working half of this month I won’t be able to add a lot to savings. I do believe that I will still be able to get my SWR down a bit and my months of expenses saved up a bit. May and June of last year were both big expense months. I’m hoping that May and June of this year will be low expense months. I base my average monthly expenses and my SWR off of my trailing twelve months of expenses. So replacing two bad months in my trailing twelve months with two good months will help lower my average monthly expense quite a bit and it will also help improve my SWR even if I don’t manage to save much money in the next couple of months.
Signing up for Motif to get the $100 is totally a good startup. I just started my small online clothing business and hopefully it would have a good result. I used part of my savings for my capital for this business and for me this month is totally a challenging month.
Good luck with your new business.