I just did the calculations and I was surprised to find that DW and I are socking away about 48% of our net income. That's about 38% in monthly savings which are taken directly from the checking account, and 10% in other miscellaneous savings which I've added up since the start of the year.
Impressive as it sounds. that 48% has only just compensated for various portfolio losses this year, due to /a/ 3-4% drop in the indices where I'm invested and /b/ another 3-4% increase in the value of the Euro. Every time I read that the Greek or Irish or Portuguese situation is going to cause the Euro to collapse, I click the little accompanying chart and find out that, compared to the USD or GBP, it's up yet again.
(Of course, if I compare to 12 months ago as opposed to 6, I'm nicely up.
Anyone can find an unrepresentative part of a graph and zoom in on it. But of course, the most recent period tends to be the one we focus on.)
An additional 9% is going to pay for the kids in college; in theory that will start to become available in a year or two, so 50% should be achievable soon. That said, DW is an easy touch and I suspect that some chunk of that money will continue to keep DS and DD off the streets - employment prospects for graduates in the UK and the rest of Europe are not looking great right now.
The best thing about doing this calculation is that it has provided me with a rough and ready check on our outgoings, which I had previously been overestimating (basically, by not including the 10% of ad hoc savings). In fact by putting that new, lower number into FIREcalc... I can almost pull the trigger tomorrow. The worry for me is how much we will have to support our kids. They are good students on solid courses, but they don't seem to have much understanding of how many hundreds of applications you need to make just to get an interview these days, and as I mentioned above, the "cold shower" approach will likely not work because DW is (from my perspective) too much of a mother hen to them.