The actual trick is probably to make most of your savings in other places - a smaller house/apartment with less "stuff" to fill it might feel just as good, ensure that you always have some form of pre-cooked food in the house to avoid the temptation of takeout for no reason other than having no energy to cook, figure out whether you can spend less on transport (do you really need the big new car for the one time a year you go on vacation, or could you rent a vehicle or take the Greyhound/Megabus/etc for that weekend?), figure out whether you actually need the latest flagship phone and an unlimited data plan (maybe consuming netflix, youtube, and spotify on the mobile network isn't such a great idea?). These are big-ticket items and it's almost always possible to save significantly on them without changing your lifestyle if you're "comfortably living".

The general point is that when you were 22 and earnt bugger all you could still live, now you're 32 and earn a lot more, you live a lot better but never started saving.

You should be saving money but you're not. So force yourself to revert some of your positive life-style changes as you actually can't afford them yet. Do it at source, set up a standing order to automatically take the money out just after pay day.

Start small, say 1%, and increase it every 3 months maybe?

To be honest, the first statement you get of your savings where you earn interest instead of paying it is quite refreshing. And you feel a little smug and a little more mind-at-rest because you know you can deal with disasters.

There is also the fact that we know the French health care system, the social aids you get if you loose your job, and your family will all come into play for some category of problems.

And there is the gamble for more comfort vs responsibility. My generation really don't want to take any kind of responsibility for anything, including society, the planet and their own life.

But even if you consider that:

- saving 10% of my income will not, in any way, let me live through my retirements. Not at half of my current life style anyway. And I do earn more money that most people.

- those are people in a very comfortable situation. Now take people with children, a loan and a standard job, and you have a much less simple picture.

- most people have been told the story that the retirement system will work, or that we will make it work. Beside, they don't thing 30 years ahead for anything.

- a lot of people won't make rational choices in their life. Taking a loan they should not, making a child they can't afford, getting married with the wrong person... Expecting people to save is already at another level of planning. We failed at educating people, but we also told them it was ok to do what they were doing.

- we have a huge value scale issue here. frugality, quality, solidarity... Those are not the thing that society promotes. Solving the retirement problem is not just an economical issue. When banks are bailed out, medias scream "money and consumption" and Trump rules the most powerful country in the world, convincing somebody to not go for take out is quite hard.

- fixing and cookie are getting a lost art.

- things do cost way more. 10% is a lot for some people.

Although I find it very peculiar that my parents could live the life my friend live, but afford children, have saving and yet now have a retirement.

A 30 years old single person with no children an a job that doesn't have a loan or crazy spending habits should not have to choose between savings and pleasures.

In UK housing has become much more expensive as a proportion of earnings, and wage rates seem to have declined in real terms.

sounds like you need to learn to live more frugal, then.

learning to not consume blindly but instead responsibly is just as important as saving money.

Although I'm not living the grand life. I don't own a car, I don't have children or crazy expensive hobbies. I cook every day, buy vegetables at the farmer market. I don't drink at all, or consume drugs, or smoke. I don't go out a lot. Once a week maybe.

Beside I find it very peculiar that my parents could live the life my friends live, yet could afford children, have saving and now have a retirement.

A 30 years old single person with no children an a job that doesn't have a loan or mad spending habits should not have to choose between savings and pleasures.

But yes, I don't deny I could definitely tune down my spending.

I'm not in a difficult situation myself. I don't have saving, but I have a nice life. I'm one of the person who can give away the 500 €. I'm more concerned that so many people around me can't.

While there is definitely an attitude issue here, it can't be the only one. I can believe there is a difference in the education my parents had. I can't, however, they were so much better planners than my friends are.

However, money is not everything. Living is France is very sweet, and the US lifetyle is peculiar. Also, I'm currently an independent dev, and the salary implied I signed a 5 years contract. That's a lot of constraints for me.

But yeah, compared to the US, dev are not well valued here. And you should see in Spain...

I understand you know that yourself, but the past is the past - my grand parents were suffering through wars.

But it would be unfair to blame entirely the current generation for their situation. I don't think another one would have ended up in such an entire different situation. Life does cost more. Society does push to consume.

I think it's just that given that the economy is probably going to be shittier and shittier, we should take the opportunity of our current still nice lives to prepare.

But yeah, we don't.

The truth is - you are born - now play the cards you are dealt. If you complain about the cards - then you are already about to lose before the game even started. Maybe next card dealt to you is Leukemia - now you will complain to yourself "why me of all the people - what have I done to deserve this?" while you wish your only problems still were being in a financially worse position than your parents. I think that's what you are doing.

Retirement on the other hand...

Now that I reached a milestone (even if I did kill the account from 300->0, 250->0 a couple of times in emergencies) I intend to increase how much I put in there. 10% of my salary is a lot to do without, my wife doesn't work, we have two kids and a mortgage and a (useless expensive) car. But the €100 I simply didn't miss, and the €200, that will get me to the next milestone, when I'll jump to €300, and so on and so on will all soon arrive.

Does anyone have any advice in this area? How can I keep the value of my 10% savings in 30 years time with low risk?

I don't want to go to an IFA. They sell me a product.

If you really want to keep it for 30 years the tax advantages of a pension are unbeatable and your employer is obliged to try to default you into one.

I have opted out of the mandatory pensions as I had debt to pay off and it makes more sense to invest in that. I'm not happy with the risk profiles of the investments they offer as well as even the low risk one has a shit return.

I'm looking for something different. TBH I'm making a reliable £300/month clear profit for a few hours effort on ebay buying and selling crap which over time has a better investment return sticking it in a low interest account that sticking a portion of salary in high interest.

That's working for now but I want something that requires less effort :)

Your eBay endeavors are basically allocating your capital to a closely held business, which is perfectly reasonable though like you said, likely unscalable.

This is not the response you wanted, and I feel terribly sorry for it, but it's something that keeps creeping up when inflation/investment discussions flame up. So, to help, and this is just my very personal suggestion: grab a reasonable amount of your "savings", enough to make an impact (>$5k), but not enough to ruin you (<$100k). Put that into a low-fee stock-trading account (Robinhood, Fidelity, etc.) — wait for one of the very, very big ones (NOT Snapchat), like Amazon, or Apple, or Microsoft to dip a bit below the average going rate for the past few weeks/months. Like Amazon, it's been hovering around $1000 for a bit if I remember correctly, now it dipped below it and everyone wants/expects to see this go over again. Find an opportunity that will net you 3-5%. Amazon was at $955 yesterday, if you expect it to go up to $1000, that's 4.7% of gain (ignoring small fees). So, like many, you'd buy a good chunk of that. Once the order is through, you set two more orders, one for $670 (that's your panic sell), and one for $1000. Then you wait.

This either takes a few days, it may take a year. It doesn't matter, if you end up with 4-5%, you take out your original investment, and you leave in whatever dollar amount you just gained. Rinse, repeat.

There will be lots of people advising you against this, and that's absolutely correct. If there was a simple system to follow to guarantee you to make all that sweet sweet money, then, by definition of the market, there would be no such system any longer. That said, this strategy has served me (personally) very well over the past 10 years, and I've made much, much more than 5% over the years. The "magic" of it is that you can get out tomorrow, or you get out in five years. If you don't need the money to live, then you are not in a hurry. This allows you to wait until the time is right.

The single-biggest enemy here, again, is our own greed. I usually aim to net a meagre $200-$700 before I sell. Even if the stock keeps rising like crazy, I normally get out after $400-$500, and rarely let it sit any longer. It's one of my rules (and others may think this is stupid, which is just as valid as me having that rule).

And I speak from experience:

I've once had a tough year, after several years of just making easy money on an ever-rising market. So, I invested all I had into Netflix. It was a 'jumpy' stock, but I figured if I time it out right, I'll end up with way, waaay more than my regular 3-5%. I could possibly make a decade of progress in my otherwise tame (but perfectly steady) stock investments. Then, Netflix dipped 40% or so, and it stayed there for quite a while (days, weeks, months...) — and I didn't have a panic-sell in place then. To make it worse, I even doubled-down as any panicked idiot would do, and Netflix dipped further. I didn't log in to my stock account for well over a year, if not almost two years I think. Then, one day, it had made its way back to the original price. I got out without losses, promised myself to never break my own rules again, and continued without a hitch after that. But, holy moly, had I needed that money, I'd not have been in a good place.

At this point, someone would usually say, the smart thing is to diversify, to spread the risk. But to me, spreading the risk is like watering things down, you're also watering down the profits. I'd rather know a lot about one stock, at most two stocks (I never do more than two), and watch them carefully, vs. having 15 stocks in my portfolio, where I barely keep up with the basics. Again, that's just me, everyone is different. Also, having small investments in many stocks (vs. one or two stocks) may drive up fees quite a bit, depending on how fast you (have to) move.

If you don't want to risk this, then funds and or an index, or a work-place matching investments type-of-plan may be best. It's other people doing the same thing for you, and you pay them a fee, regardless of performance. Which never felt right to me (I still advise to do this if you don't care about stocks or actually taking care of the money).

I still firmly believe that someone who continues to save hard, and keep that money far away from your 'usual spending money' will almost always beat someone trying to optimise their investment strategies.

Oh, lastly, you obviously have to pay tax on short-term gains. So this will come into effect as well. Depending on your location/tax-jurisdiction, this will be handled differently and it may make sense to optimise based on that (>1 year investments).

Just my 2 cents.

"There will be lots of people advising you against this, and that's absolutely correct."

It's merely a personal tale of what works for me. I'm not a financial advisor, and I am not here to teach nor preach.

Your concentrated stock exposure requires someone to be a professional trader, which generally speaking is a losing game for most of us.

For reference, I am plugging a fair amount of cash into a savings account when I come across it and avoiding unnecessary luxuries. That in itself has netted me a fair amount of cash and flexibility. Not spending it is better than saving it.

I'll read further into the investment side of things. I really want to get 50% of my cash reserve into something with a better return at the moment.

Currently I am taking 1-5% of that and netting £300/month profit which totals about a 11% a year rate but the effort is quite large for this.

If everybody started saving 10% of their salary, the decrease in consumer spending would put deflationary pressure on the economy. That could, in turn, lead to a few different possible scenarios depending on the economic policy decisions of the government and the central bank:

1. If the economic authorities refused to respond and decided to "let nature take its course" on the economy, the reduction in consumer spending would lead to businesses shuttering and people losing their jobs. Maybe instead of 1/3 of people not saving any of their salary, 1/3 of people just wouldn't have salaries in the first place.

2. The central bank can lower interest rates thereby making it easier for people to borrow. This easy borrowing would provide an incentive for people to spend. This could counteract the effects of whatever was incentivizing them to save in the first place. Or maybe we'll end up in a situation where people think they're saving, borrowing, and spending all at the same time and what's really happening is that they're "investing" in some kind of asset bubble that they don't know is a bubble.

3. The fiscal authority borrows and spends money into the economy to make up for the drop in consumer spending (and, if distributed well, that money circulates and boosts consumers pending too). This fiscal expansion route is kind of the opposite of the monetary expansion route in scenario #2. Here, the government is going into debt in a stable and controlled manner. With the central bank lowering interest rates (#2 above), you're encouraging the expansion of private debt, which is unstable and can collapse.

I don't make economic policy, but if I did, I'd tend to lean toward option #3. Of course, it entails the central bank and the country's government working together to make it happen. The ECB would have to encourage (or at least allow) the EU member nations to go further into debt. In the case of America, the Fed doesn't have that kind of control over the government. If Congress decided to take on massive government debt and spend new money into the economy, the Fed would have no choice but to take the necessary actions to keep prices stable (raise interest rates, etc).

Well, that turned into a little rant about things I care about. I guess my overall point is that if Everyone started saving 10% of their salary, it would be a huge shock to the economy, and probably not a good one. And what happens next would depend on a lot of things that I think about a lot.

Anyway, solving this "problem" is not just about a shift in attitude toward saving. At least not in the general sense. I do agree with you that it's not an unsolvable problem for an average comfortably-living individual.

Worry about that if it happens, because it almost certainly won't.