If you wish to reach FIRE at a certain date, you have to keep a close watch on your monthly Savings Rates (SR).
This page does exactly that. Here you can find a monthly overview of my fire Savings Rate per month and year. For completeness’ sake, I started in January 2018 with my fire SR percentage. Since October 2019 I also provide a monthly detailed overview of my income and expenses to give you an in-depth look into my way of living and how I achieve my SR. Full transparency!
My MO for my Savings Rate
My SR-graph will get updated at the end of every month. These updates will be fairly short and follow the same pattern as much as possible:
- I use the new YNAB to generate a detailed overview of all my income and expenses for each month in a clean table.
- From this table, I make a collapsed and summarized screenshot that I then upload to this page.
- In the sidebar, the SR of that month will be shown. It also links back to this page.
Since a picture says more than a thousand words, you can find the details of each month starting with October 2018 right below the SR-graph.
In the case of large outliers or one-time income or expenses, I will give a bit of context to the image.
My Savings Rates- 2018
- 2019
- 2020
- 2021
- 2018
- 2019
- 2020
- 2021
Savings Rate Details
2020 Average Savings Rate: 45.59%
August was a bit more expensive than expected. Mainly because the summer sales got moved to this month. I tried my best not to fall for the tricks they try to apply every year and I think I succeeded very well. But even then, I did buy a few things I needed. One of which was pretty expensive. I also continued with the investment in my blog.
If I had to describe July in one month it would be ‘fun’. Bit of a weird thing to say during a pandemic, no?
Thanks to a couple of trips and celebrating my wife’s graduation from her Master (yeaaaah! well done!) we were able to forget the return of the Jedi coronavirus. So how did I do? Have a look at my monthly review!
After a thrilling May, June was a lot less crazy. That is not to say nothing happened. I actually invested quite a bit in the site. These investments made my SR drop but thanks to my holiday pay, I was able to keep the damage to a minimum. I received 4,674.86 EUR and spend less of it. What did I spend? Have a look at my monthly review!
May was a rollercoaster in terms of emotions. I had to process the loss of my grandma in the midst of a pandement. At the same time I felt my heart skip a beat as I received the benefit of her dedication to saving money and preparing ahead. She foresaw a life insurance for her grandchildren which resulted in receiving over 27,000 EUR. Thanks to this small windfall I was able to reach a record breaking Savings Rate of 93%.
April was a month full of adjustment and preparation for May. This resulted in another lesser month for my Savings Rate, at least compared to older ones. When it comes to expenses I had to make one big one that impacted my overall SR severely. The coronavirus crisis changed things but not drastically.
March was an excellent month from a Savings point of view. My Savings Rate skyrocketed thanks to a tax deduction of a solid 16,000 EUR. When it comes to expenses I was able to keep it relatively low. at least relative to the high income I received this month. This should allow me to keep my expenses low in April as well, though time will tell. The coronavirus crisis could change things. It already did when I invested a first 7.5k EUR at the beginning of March.

February was alright. The first week was my last week in my fiance’s home country which ended up costing me a bit more than expected. On the income side I only had my main job as I haven’t started my flexi-job yet. At least the end result isn’t as low as January.

2020 starts off with a bang. I came from Istanbul and on the 24th I visited my GF’s home-country. I did a lot of traveling in January so of course my SR is very low.
Thanks to a good income and expenses that are spread across two months (some expenses were made in February) I was able to stay in positive territory.
Savings Rate History
All time average Savings Rate: 65.85%