Saving: Awareness
Understand what saving means, what's possible, and where you stand. About 15 minutes.
Saving is the single most foundational financial behaviour. The evidence for its impact on wellbeing is strong and consistent.
Emergency savings are the strongest predictor of overall financial wellbeing – stronger than income level, debt-to-income ratio, or investment portfolio size. Having even a modest emergency fund significantly reduces financial stress and improves decision-making across all other financial domains.
Yet most people have dangerously thin buffers. 24 – 27% of adults have no emergency savings at all, and only 27 – 28% have six or more months of expenses saved. The national savings rate hovers between 3 – 5%, and the bottom 40% of earners have negative savings rates.
The psychological cost is substantial. People without emergency savings spend an average of 7.3 hours per week worrying about finances – nearly double the rate of those with even a modest buffer. Saving creates genuine choice: a financial buffer turns forced reactions into deliberate decisions, giving you the freedom to leave a bad job, seize an opportunity, or weather a crisis without going into debt.
People save for different reasons. This site scores every saving intervention across three core values. Later, you'll set your own weighting across these three values, and the site will rank interventions by how well they deliver on the things you actually care about.
Security
Building and maintaining a financial buffer against unexpected expenses and income disruption. People who lean towards this value focus on emergency funds, insurance, and ensuring their reserves can absorb shocks without resorting to debt. They prioritise stability and protection from downside scenarios.
Lifestyle
Saving toward specific lifestyle goals – holidays, experiences, purchases, and planned upgrades to quality of life. People who lean towards this value see saving as a tool for living better, not just surviving emergencies. They balance present enjoyment with future security and maintain targeted savings accounts for near-term goals.
Growth
Accumulating wealth over time through consistently high savings rates. People who lean towards this value focus on the long-term trajectory of their wealth – steadily increasing net worth, maximising the rate at which savings compound, and sustaining saving discipline across years and decades.
The Top 0.1% band represents roughly 1 in 1,000 people. To give you a sense of what that looks like for each saving value:
Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache) retired at 30 after saving aggressively on a moderate software engineering salary. He accumulated enough invested assets to cover his family's living expenses indefinitely without earned income, achieving complete financial security through disciplined saving and frugal living. His detailed public accounting of household expenses demonstrates sustained annual spending well below the median, funded entirely by investment returns.
Paula Pant built a savings system designed explicitly around lifestyle goals. She saved enough to buy multiple rental properties in her 20s, then used the income to fund extended international travel and eventual full financial independence. Her approach treats saving as the mechanism for buying freedom and experiences, maintaining full liquidity and access to capital at all times while funding a deliberately chosen lifestyle.
Jacob Lund Fisker (Early Retirement Extreme) sustained a savings rate above 75% for five years on a postdoctoral researcher's salary, accumulating 25 times his annual expenses and reaching full financial independence by age 33. His meticulous documentation of the process shows how extreme savings rates compress the timeline to financial independence from decades to years.
Awareness means knowing your starting point. Answer each question below – some you might know off the top of your head, others might take a few minutes to look up.
Security
Lifestyle
Growth
Your estimated position
Percentiles are estimates based on published population data for American and British adults. Lifestyle items are recorded for your awareness but not scored, as the available data does not support reliable percentile estimates.
You now understand why saving matters, what different people get out of it, what's achievable, and where you currently stand. The final step is to set your personal value weightings and see which interventions are the best fit for you.
On the interventions page, adjust the sliders to reflect how much you care about security, lifestyle, and growth. The table will re-rank interventions to match your priorities.
Awareness assessment complete
You've built your foundation in Saving. Your self-assessment and value weightings are saved.
View Your Interventions