How the Grizzly Sleuth Saves – Update
We started a survey last week to get a sense of the finances of our readers. It’s been a great success so far! We have about 150 responses already, and for a blog that’s been in existence all of 3 weeks I’m deeming that a pretty good showing. Thank you to everyone who’s responded already! I’m going to keep the survey open for another week, but I wanted to give folks a preview of some of the findings.
Saving Is More Powerful than Income
Awesome, verifiable proof that what we’re preaching here works. You don’t need to make loads of money to retire early. You need to stop spending on so much crap and invest the difference. The below is some dry statistics stuff, but I’ll explain.
This is a test using the responses of the survey to see what better predicts how many years everyone has till retirement. The thing to look at is the coefficient value for Income vs. the one for savings. Increasing your savings rate was 4x more powerful than increasing your income for shortening your time till retirement. That’s HUGE! For every step you moved up on the income scale you only moved up by .09 steps towards retirement. For every step you moved up on the savings scale you moved up .36 steps. This means that for our respondents changing their savings rate from 5% to 20% is moving them from retiring in 20-40 years to retiring in 10-20 years. But you could move all the way from $25k in income to >$300k and if you didn’t adjust your savings rate you would still be looking at never being able to retire. I fully expected to find this, but it’s awesome to get such great confirmation.
We Skew Young
Most of us are either starting our careers or starting to hit the midpoint. We’re a younger crowd here in the bear cave, with 80% of us under 40 years old. That means there’s still tons of time for most of us to get this turned around and on the right path.
| Age | % of Responses |
| 20-30 | 29.14% |
| 30-40 | 49.67% |
| 40-50 | 13.25% |
| 50-65 | 7.95% |
We’re Savers, but there are potential converts as well
Compared to the US average savings rate of 5.7% we’re doing pretty good as a group. However, it looks like there are still some potential converts in the audience. What we’re shooting for here is the 40%+ range or even higher if you’re willing to go all in. I think we can get there!
| Savings Rate | % of Responses |
| <5% | 5% |
| 5-10% | 7% |
| 10-20% | 14% |
| 20-40% | 25% |
| 40-60% | 34% |
| 60-80% | 11% |
| 80-100% | 3% |
| Retired! | 1% |
Broad Range of Incomes and Net Worth
We come from a broad swath of income and net worth. Our readers definitely skew to the high end of both considering US median net income is $56k and net worth is hovering around $40k, but we do have a diverse mix from across the spectrum.
| Net Worth | % of Responses | Income | % of Responses |
| Negative | 3% | <$25k | 1% |
| $0-50k | 11% | $25-50k | 9% |
| $50-200k | 17% | $50-75k | 14% |
| $200-300k | 14% | $75-100k | 18% |
| $300-500k | 17% | $100-150k | 23% |
| $500k – $1M | 17% | $150-200k | 17% |
| $1-2M | 17% | $200-300k | 13% |
| >$2M | 5% | >$300k | 5% |
How the Grizzly Sleuth Saves – Survey
If you haven’t taken the survey yet go ahead! And thank you to everyone else for completing. It’s been awesome for us to get a sense of who we’re talking to!
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