Question: How much would you need to save every day in order to have one million dollars?
Answer: Depends on your timeline.
(the following examples assume a 5% annual interest rate)
If you want to save a million bucks in ten years you would need to save $211 every day. But if you give yourself twenty years you would only need to save $80 per day.
Or maybe it’s easier to think about saving money in terms of weeks. If you want to save a million bucks in ten years you would need to save $1,483 per week. If you give yourself twenty years you would need to save $560 per week.
Or maybe you prefer to think of savings in terms of months. To save a million bucks in ten years you would need to save $6,440 per month. If you give yourself twenty years you would need to save $2,433 per month.
But what if your goal isn’t $1 million? What if it’s $2 million? Or only half a million? Or maybe just $10,000?
Fortunately for you, the following three charts show how much you need to save each day, each week, or each month to reach your savings goals.
All three grids assume you are starting from $0 and that your savings grow at an annual interest rate of 5%. All numbers in the grids are rounded to the nearest dollar.
The Daily Savings Grid
The Weekly Savings Grid
The Monthly Savings Grid
Some Interesting Observations
- To save half a million dollars in 10 years or less you need to save at least $100 per day.
- You can save $1 million dollars in 20 years by saving $560 per week.
- You can save $100k in 7 years by saving about $1,000 per month.
- A 22 year-old college grad can have half a million dollars saved by age 42 by saving $280 per week.
Zach is the author behind Four Pillar Freedom, a blog that teaches you how to build wealth and gain freedom in life.
He quit his day job as a data scientist in 2019 because he was able to earn enough income from profitable websites to replace his salary. He now teaches people how to start and grow their own profitable websites from scratch in the Income Community.
Zach's favorite free financial tool he's been using since 2015 to manage his net worth is Personal Capital. Each month he uses their free Investment Checkup tool and Retirement Planner to track his investments and ensure that he's on the fast track to financial freedom.
His favorite investment platform is M1 Finance, a site that allows him to build a custom portfolio of stocks for free, has no trading or maintenance fees, and even allows him to set up automated target-allocated investments.
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Interesting numbers and helpful to see the various time perspectives.
Just curious – what application did you use to create the grids? Excel or Sheets (or something else)? I also enjoy using conditional formatting for visual trending.
I used Excel to create the grids. The conditional formatting is also one of my favorite features, I think it helps highlight the differences between the numbers nicely.