25 in 2025: Save 25% of your income

Challenges
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2025 is almost here and we’re continuing the HARD challenge of saving 25% of your income.

We are continuing the 24 in 2024 challenges but have slightly adjusted the goal post for a new year - by 1%!

It’s simple but not easy: save 24% of your income in 2024!

:memo: If saving 25% of your income is easy for you (or if your income is over 100K) - please use the alternative 25 in 2025 Challenge: Save $20,250
Both get the same sticker, but the threads will have people at similar income/challenge levels.*

Basic rules:

  • The goal is to save 25% of your pre-tax income in 2024. If you make $40,000 per year, that’s $10,000 or $833 per month.
  • DEBT REPAYMENT COUNTS
  • You can combine any type of savings: emergency fund, 401K, Super, IRA, ISA, taxable
    investments, buffer, house down payment fund, student loan payments - to reach your goal.
  • You can choose household or individual salary, whichever you prefer.

What Counts

  • Debt repayment counts towards your savings rate!
  • Mortgage principal (but not interest or escrow) counts.
  • Only savings that occurs between 1/1/2025 and 12/31/2025 count.
  • You can use tax refund or any other windfall money towards your savings percentage, but you then must count that windfall towards your overall income.
  • You can count your income and savings jointly with a partner or separately - up to you!
  • Student loan forgiveness counts (either PSLF or workplace), but only if you also count it in your gross income.

What do you get:

  • Support on this thread as you go along - post monthly or quarterly check-ins as appropriate
  • A forum badge after you complete your 25% goal for the year
  • A sticker mailed to you for free anywhere in the world!
  • A shoutout on the livestream for reaching your goal

Here’s all the 25 in 2025 Challenges:

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Woohoo!!! I’m in :grinning:

This year I will track differently. In 2024 I really needed to have a cash cushion, since I depleted it in 2023. But my budget wasn’t setup in a way that I could easily track my cash savings, so I was using the Income vs Expenses in YNAB and whatever was left at the end of the month was counted as cash savings. This meant that sinking funds were included in the savings and on months where I didn’t have any big sinking fund the savings rate was artificially high, and on months where I had a big expense it was lower than I hoped and I felt guilty. I’m happy with my cash cushion now so I won’t track cash savings for 2025.

So in 2025 I will track the following:

-FHSA
-TFSA
-Pension

No RRSP this year, I don’t have that much room, I prefer to save it for when I’ll have a higher salary.

Edit: i changed my mind and decided to beef up my emergency fund, so I’ll track the EF as well.

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Clarification: does all of debt repayment count, or just the principal like with mortgage?

It’s probably irrelevant, 25% is likely out of reach under either scenario. But I’ll give 202.5/wk a try, and stretch if I can based on any windfalls or happy surprises with salary.

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I’m in again this year! Still trying to set my other financial/savings goals for the year, but I hit 24% last year and I’m hoping to get 25% saved this year. Right now, that’s $18,000 over the course of the year, so roughly $1,500 per month.

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