为自己的财政做下压力测试

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Poppy Harlow is joining us to, to take us through this, Poppy, what do you think?

Ah, let’s take a look at, it’s a tool on our site of the Personal Finance section of cnnMoney.com, your financial help, find it right there at the top of the website. Let’s go into this, let’s show you what it looks like. What we did is factor in the age of 40 and an annual income of 50,000 dollars. Let’s continue and take a look here, at what that would mean?

Take a look at all of these different areas. You can put into your housing payment, your debt, what you have saved for emergencies. We put in some numbers here to show you where you could stand. Let’s say your debt, this is by month, including your mortgage, any loan payments, your credit card debt, let’s say it’s 1800 dollars. How does that leave you on a 50,000 dollars salary? You are in danger, you are carrying too much debt. You should, ah, in order to stay out of trouble, those debt payments monthly should not exceed 36% of your gross income.

But what about your housing payments? Because that’s a big expense for everyone. Take a look here at housing. Let’s pull it up. And what we put in here is 1200 dollars, whether you are renting or whether it’s your mortgage. Well, does that put you at 50,000 dollars a year? You are 40 years old: Careful again, you are spending too much on your housing, that payment shouldn’t exceed 28% of your gross income.

And then finally we decided to talk about retirement savings. This is key, especially right now. Take a look here, what we put in is 500 dollars, so 10% of what you’re making every month. You are putting that away. You already have 75,000 dollars saved. That puts you in pretty good shape. You are on the right track for retirement,( Nice.) pretty nice, right?

This is incredible. I think that is what a great tool, (It really is. It’s fascinating.) This answers so many the questions, so many people ask us all the time. I do wanna say though, that 28% for housing, you know, I think there are a lot of people in this country who very legitimately spend more than 28% on housing, on housing, yeah. (Especially in this city, especially in New York or in some of the bigger metropolitan areas, yeah.) You live in San Francisco or Chicago or So, you know, but I think that’s a good tool, because if you can be on the good side of many of those measures, then that's a stress test, right? (Yeah.) You can even handle a recession, you can handle ...

Yeah, I took it myself, I passed some of them, not all of them. But it’s good to know, (Right.) (Yeah.) and what I should say on housing, we put in 1200 dollars, if you are paying 1100 dollars, they said you are safe there. And on the debt, we put in 1800, but if you are saving, but if your debt payment is 1500 a month, so they were (Great) pretty close, but not exactly.

That’s fantastic, Poppy.

(Alright. Poppy Harlow…)

So you can find it, yeah?

Thank you for that, your own personal stress test, I'm gonna do that.

vocabulary:

1.       factor in: to include a particular thing in your calculations about how long something will take, how much it will cost etc

2.       gross income: 毛收入，所有扣减前的个人收入总额

3.       legitimately: 正当地，合理地