Quote:
Originally Posted by disneysteve
Until 6 months ago, you were living on 45K. You now have over 250K coming in. Surely, your expenses didn't go up 6-fold overnight like your income did. You've got a great gift right now. Don't blow it.
If you start saving 30% right now, that's 75K to savings, leaving you 175K to live on (and I'm not even counting the 25K bonus). If you were living on 45K, you can certainly live very, very nicely on 175K. The biggest mistake people make is elevating their lifestyles to match their incomes. This is particularly true of doctors and other professionals who see a rapid rise in income when they finish training and get real jobs. Just because you are earning all of that money does not mean you need to find a way to spend it all.
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Steve - you also need to consider taxes in your calculation. We make a bit more than the poster and our tax bill is about $60K for Federal and State. This will likely increase under Obama.
In terms of how much to save, you should be able to count debt payment acceleration towards your totals. For example we are only saving about $40K per year, but we are overpaying out student loan debt and HELOC by about $30K per year.