Hey, it’s Jeffrey — back again!

My financial planner told me something a while back that stuck with me. He said 15% savings rate means you'll retire. 20% means you're serious about it. 25% means retirement is a top priority.

Simple enough. But then a calendar turned to 2026, retirement contributions changed, and I realized— I don’t know my current savings rate.

I knew roughly what went into my 401k. I had a general sense of our other contributions. But I'd never added up every savings vehicle across our household and divided by gross income to get one clean number.

So I built a prompt to do it.

Here's what's interesting: most people think of their savings rate as just their 401k contribution. But the real number includes employer match, HSA, IRA, brokerage, 529, even extra mortgage principal. When you add it all up, your actual savings rate is almost always different from what you think. Sometimes lower. Sometimes meaningfully higher.

Either way, you should probably know.

Run it now → Claude

What we found:

Our household savings rate came back at 24.1%.

I honestly expected something closer to 22%. But when I added up both 401k contributions, employer matches, brokerage, and a few other accounts I'd been mentally filing under "that's just automatic," the real number was higher than I thought.

We landed in the 20–25% tier: "seriously accelerating." Not quite at the 25% threshold where my planner says retirement becomes a top priority, but well past the 20% line where you're clearly doing more than the minimum.

The part that surprised me most: to jump from 24.1% to 25%, we'd need to save an additional $217 per month. That's it. Two percentage points sounds like a big move, but in dollar terms it's basically a rounding error at our income level. Whether that's worth doing is a real question, not an obvious one.

The prompt also estimated we're tracking toward financial independence in roughly 16 years, which puts us in our early-to-mid 50s. That's ahead of schedule by most standards, but it's not "quit at 45" territory. Knowing the actual number makes it easier to decide whether to push harder or enjoy the pace we're at.

That's the real value of this one. Not a verdict on whether you're saving enough, but an actual number you can make decisions with.

Best of all, I love how Claude is developing really cool visualizations for results like this. Be sure to see for yourself using the prompt above.

Keep going? Once you've got your savings rate, try these follow-up prompts:

AI tip worth trying this week: filing a consumer dispute

I signed up for a pickleball league that didn't deliver anything close to what was advertised. I knew I wanted a refund, and I had all the facts — I just had no idea how to actually write a dispute. What do you even put in one of those? So I talked through the whole situation with Claude, and it turned my rambling frustration into a clear, professional message with the right tone and the right details in the right order.

It even helped me fit the whole case into Citi's 500-character dispute form. If you've been putting off a complaint or similar task because you don't know how to word it, just dump the facts into AI and let it do the formatting.

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