I saved 50% of my income for a month - and it wasn't as impossible as I expected

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Emmie Roosevelt Island

Emmie Martin/Business Insider

I didn't know what to expect when I set out to save 50% of my income for a month.

On August 1, 2016, Brandon - the blogger behind financial independence blog the Mad Fientist - retired at 34.

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My colleague Libby Kane talked to Brandon - who doesn't use his last name online for privacy reasons - about his journey to early retirement, where he revealed that he saved and invested around 70% of his take-home income in order to reach his goal.

After hearing Brandon's story - and so many others like it - I decided to try my hand at saving the majority of my earnings as well.

While I have no plans to retire early, I wanted to see firsthand how attainable that lifestyle is. After crunching the numbers with my editor for a solid half-hour, we concluded there was no way I could put away 70% of my total income for a month and still afford both rent and food, so I aimed to save 50% of my disposable income instead.

Because I live in New York City, my rent is higher than it would be in most places in the country. And since I wasn't going to move out of NYC just for the duration of a month-long experiment, to make the project more realistic I decided to count disposable income as everything after rent. So after paying rent, I put half of what remained of my monthly paycheck in savings and lived off the other half for the entirety of September.

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While I'm lucky to have more than enough to continue to live comfortably, it was immediately challenging to adapt to a much lower budget than I was used to. But it didn't prove impossible.