I feel stupid, mostly because I was stupid, about not tracking my money closely. After listing my income and (temporarily) fixed expenses I find our income is $1000 a month more than our outgo. Had I been paying attention I'd have been putting that aside instead of leaving it in checking and eventually spending it on some splurge or some "emergency". I just transferred $1000 from checking to savings, and will do so every month.
We are not high income people, yet we have a spare thousand a month. Along with some other automatic deductions from pay our savings rate is now 36% of income. Next we work on the food expenses. Then transportation. I bet we can get our savings rate to 50% by the end of the year.
Amazing what can be done if one is "awake".