I bet I won’t surprise you, if I say that money is an essential part of our life and we cannot do without it from the day we are born and the day we die. Our life is full of questions and the majority of them are ‘million dollar questions’ tightly connected with nothing else but money issues. In my previous post I wrote about frugal and cheap leaving and things associated with them, though these concepts are entirely different, they are all about money and saving them.

Lots of people associate their present, nearest and distant future with money problems even when they have good amount of money, paid bills and manage to make timely payments on their loans. This happens because of one simple reason - we are prone to money worries which usually cause stresses and even heart attacks. The best way of staying away from money stresses is to plan and manage both your expenditures and savings. Obviously, it’s much easier to set the sum you can afford to spend than to decide on how much to save. Yes, this question can be rather difficult to answer because the only adviser in this situation is you yourself. You know how much you earn, how much you need for living, what your monetary goals are, how much money you will need when you are retired and how much money you will like to give your hiers when you die.

One day I decided that it was time for me to sit down and figure out how much of my monthly and yearly income I should be able to sacrifice for my “savings”. I always realized that I need to save money for my long-term goals but I never tried to calculate an estimated figure. I googled for savings calculators the other day and came across a handy social security calculator which estimates your earnings based on information you provide in seconds. Life expectancy calculator is another tool I’ve found to be very helpful for estimating the length of your retirement, and amount of money you’ll need.

Image credit: Day 157