A new Bankrate survey paints a distressing picture of Americans' finances. The study shows that 46 percent of us are saving no more than 5 percent of our income.

"People are woefully under-saved, for both emergencies and retirement. I think these numbers tell us why," said Greg McBride, a chief financial analyst at Bankrate, according to U.S. News & World Report. "Not enough people are saving. Not enough people are saving enough."

So how much should we be saving?

"Between emergency savings and the ever-increasing burden of retirement savings that is on the individual, the goal should be 15 percent of your income," McBride said, according to CNNMoney.

A total of 18 percent of us are saving nothing at all, while 28 percent of us save 5 percent or less.

The top savers are in the middle class — those with annual income of $50,000 to $74,999. A total of 35 percent of them are saving more than 10 percent of their income, topping even the highest-income households.

Meanwhile, as the poet Robert Burns wrote, "The best-laid schemes of mice and men . . . leave us nothing but grief and pain."

That applies to financial planning, financial author Carl Richards writes in "The One-Page Financial Plan: A Simple Way to Be Smart About Your Money," as excerpted in The New York Times.

There's a search for certainty in our financial planning, he explains. "We want to know exactly how much money we'll need to achieve [our financial goals] and precisely how we're going to get it," Richards says.

"But I don't think that certainty is possible. Not at all. So here's another idea: we should simply take our best guess — let's call it what it is — at what we want our financial future to look like. . . . Then we can make decisions that support our goals, with lots of improvisation and further guesswork along the way."

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