Minimum Regular Savings? 5 October 2011 at 7:37PM edited 30 November -1 at 1:00AM in How much have you saved? 3 replies 1.8K views

McFilly

I want to start saving seriously but can't afford to save much at all. Just wondered what the minimum was that people are saving. I know every little helps as they say but it's hard when there's not much available to save.

coldcazzie

I think 10% is a good minimum, but I have been in the situation where I couldn't even afford that, so I basically just put anything spare aside. Sometimes it was £5, sometimes it was £25, but every little helps

Doom_and_Gloom

I have a regular savings account that I put £20 in a month. This was started by my parents when I was born and was planned to be given to me when I was 18 for uni/a house deposit. I didn't cash it in at 18 so my parents continued paying into it until I was 21 as a 'reward' for not doing so. I took it over at 21 and kept up with the saving instead of cashing it in. £20 a month isn't alot but it is managable and £240 a year saved into the savings account is better than nothing .

My partner and I are also saving for our wedding. We don't do a regular savings for that a month though. Instead we have a budget for the year and whatever is left over come the 1st of the next year goes into the wedding budget. This gives us the drive to keep our spending down as it means more money for the wedding budget. I think this works better than a set savings per month for it as we would be tempted to only do the savings we agreed on and nothing else. This way we are really working on saving money for a real cause. We hear in our heads "don't buy XXX as that is ££ towards the wedding".

Catslovelycats

Have you thought about joining the Virtual Savings Pot group?
We save money every Friday by rounding off our current account balance down to the nearest £10 and saving anything in excess of that. (I do it by rounding down to £5 not £10).
It doesn't sound much, but I've managed to save nearly £250 this year by doing that.
The link is here: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=2896760