I cant save money

I didn't do banking in NY, so I cannot offer an first-hand advice other than the obvious "have you considered a roommate". What I would do, and what really helps me, is to track all of your expenses for a few months to see where the money is going. You can use something basic like pen & paper or Excel, or you can use a website/app like Mint. Your last sentence is your problem, though. You need to cut back. You're making a ton of money, but you're living in a very expensive city.

Most of this advice is spot on, but what you need to do the most is (as aspiringcoolperson said) is pay yourself first.

Bump your 401k to 10% (minimum) if it isn't there already, and from now on take 25% of your net pay each paycheck and send it straight to savings. Boom, you are instantly doing much better. It should be close to open enrollment for your health insurance - figure out what you spent on healthcare (glasses, contacts, dentist, doctor, etc.) this year and throw that money into a FSA or HSA for 2017. Congrats, all your health expenses next year will be pre-tax.

75% of that third year bonus (net) should be going straight into savings as well, so don't plan some big blowout in Ibiza. No crazy nice dinner for your first date with that chick from Bumble. And so on.

You make a shit ton of money. New York is expensive but you can do a lot better. There's a lot of easy little wins you can take advantage of.

no bad advice so far, but your problem is not logistics, it's emotional/behavioral. you need to change your lifestyle in order to be able to save money. no amount of iphone apps, free checking accts, etc., are going to change what the actual problem is.

Asatar is right, first you need to move. living in an expensive area is your first mistake, you need to lower this by lowering your standards AND getting roommates. you do NOT need to live in squalor to save money, but paying nearly $2k/mo in rent is absurd.

once you move, change your routines. what kinda gym do you go to? if equinox, is it really worth it? try to cut that expense in half. also, take a good hard look at your monthly spending, see what's the highest discretionary expense. you can do all kinds of tips and tricks to lower your fixed expenses (cutting cable cord, switching cell phone plans all the time, etc.), but discretionary is likely what's killing you.

once you determine what it is, come back here and we'll have some better tips for you. my guess is it's one of a few things: clothes, food, bar, hobbies (golf/tennis for example), drugs, or dating. I'd rather not write a dissertation on each of those, so if you could help us out by narrowing down where you need tips, I'm happy to help.

in short, you need to change your lifestyle, but you need help in finding a happy middle between a penny pinching pariah who never leaves the house and someone who is a conspicuous consumer.

Something I used when I was in my 20s and cash was tight - withdraw the total spending money at the beginning of each month and place it in envelopes for each week. Each week, put that week's cash in your wallet and restrict yourself to paying cash for everything.

The physicality of seeing the cash and knowing you only have that to get through the week helps apply some brakes to your spending.

As a third year analyst at an EB you should absolutely be able to save money. To give you context, I'm in a similar position to you, work in SF, make in the 100s pre tax. As some have mentioned I have a little excel model which I use to get a high level sense of where my money goes and how much I have to spend.

The way it roughly looks is

Pre Tax Income - Max out 401k(18k) = Taxable Income

Taxable Income * Tax Rate = Money I have for living/additional saving

With that money I divide by 12 and get an idea of how much I have to play around with each month.

I usually allocate money towards the big bucket expenses which include

Cable Internet Phone(work pays for it) Food(Meals Out, groceries, and daily breakfast/lunches etc) Transportation(Ubers/Public Transit) Misc Expenses(Dropbox, Spotify, Audible, etc) Gym(Equinox, but at a discounted rate) Rent(~$2k)

And even with all of that I max out 401k, put more money into a trading account, and still feel like I live a luxurious life for a mid 20s professional.

Looking at your description I think the biggest expenditure that I you spend on that I don't is travel. Going to Europe/Skiing in Colorado are thousands of dollars each time. Honestly, 2-3 of those trips a year would probably run me like 10k or so. Add in a trip to vegas and some other misc expenses and that pretty much wipes out my 401 contribution.

If you really want to travel, I'd start working on credit card churning and use points to go nice places. I've been working on that and its pretty easy to amass a pretty big balance of points that can be used for vacations. It especially helps if you're a big spender.

So two parts to this. The first is practical. The second is philosophical.

The prop traders I used to know in Chicago always said that learning to break even and then make money as a trader was about figuring out how you lose money, figuring out what were your losing trades, figuring out why you made them, how to avoid them going forward.

I suggest you do four things to get the big picture snapshot:

1.) Calculate how much money you bring home every 4 week or 1 month pay cycle. This should be pretty easy. Get your pay stubs. Also take a look at your annual bonuses, but this should be considered separately from your salary. 2.) Calculate how much you spend on your credit cards. Again, this should be easy. Review 2-3 months of statements. 3.) Add to all of this what you spend on rent - $1900, apparently. 4.) Figure out how much you spend outside of your credit cards. I try to put everything on my 2% cashback credit card, so this is only a couple hundred a month, plus a disability policy and my electric bill.

Give us a breakdown of what you've spent on in the past three months besides rent.

Your rent looks in-line. I was spending $1900/month for a JR 1 bedroom in Midtown West. I think you may be able to save a bit with a roommate, though. Something to consider if you're not already doing it.

Now you have a rough estimate. We'll need to go down the credit card bill and make some adjustments to it-- ideally we'd take a 1-year average of your spending and then start doing some adjustments to the capex.

But I think, deep down, you're a finance guy, and you know what you have to do and what needs to be done to fix this. You're unmotivated to do it. So we need to get a bit more philosophical to fix this.

I could tell you that historically, equities have returned about 6.5% per year after inflation. If this trend continues, and if you can build a portfolio that sustains a 4% withdrawal rate at retirement, every dollar you save today is 50 cents per year at retirement. If you save $50K next year, that's $2000/month in retirement. Or if you buy the right dividend stocks, that's $200/month in dividends, taxed at a mere 15%. One of my behavioral tricks was to stick my money into dividend-paying equities. Today, I think the stock market is a little bit overvalued so I stick extra money into my mortgage, although as rates rise that is going to shift towards CDs.

I could tell you that having money in the bank makes it a whole lot easier to sleep at night when you screw something up at work or your firm announces layoffs. That there's a hidden interest payment on cash or even cash equities.

The secret to saving more money isn't to hate spending money-- it's to enjoy saving money more than you enjoy spending it. Skipping a trip to the Keys might save you $3000, but the real fun in that is that if you stick the savings into Exelon or Brookfield Infrastructure or Prosper (online lending), the dividend next year will give you enough money to eat out ~3-4 times at a really nice restaurant (I define really nice as $40-$50 per plate)- and you'll still have your investment at the end of the year and can use it to pay for the Keys then.

I also enjoy measuring my runway. If I liquidated all of my assets and never worked again, how long could I make it? Right now, that figure is 5.5 years strictly in terms of liquid net worth. If you count the equity in my condo (which I measure net of expected transaction costs), that increases to 7 years. Now, 18 months of that figure is emergency savings which isn't earning any returns, but the balance-- 5.5 years (including the equity), is probably earning a 6% return after inflation on average. So every year I work, if I save nothing, my runway increases 3-4 months on average. My assets are now pulling roughly 1/4-1/3 of the weight of my lifestyle. That's a really good feeling to have.

But I got here by measuring my runway in terms of being broke, then having a few months of expenses, then several months of expenses, then a year and some months. By the time I got to a year (and it wasn't long), my assets were compounding at a material rate-- enough to sustain 3 weeks of living expenses every year. It was incremental, and every time I got tired of saving, I thought about where I had started ($0), where I had gotten to, and how much better I felt for having that money saved. And it kept me going.

So that's why I enjoy saving money. Maybe you can enjoy it, too.