Capital Flow Watch

Saving is the conservation of money. Methods of saving include putting money aside in a bank or pension plan. Saving also includes reducing expenditures, such as recurring costs. In terms of personal finance, saving specifies low-risk preservation of money, as in a deposit account, versus investment, wherein risk is higher.

In economics, personal saving has been defined as disposable income minus personal consumption expenditure. In other words, income that is not consumed by immediately buying goods and services is saved. Other kinds of saving can occur, as with corporate retained earnings (profits minus dividend and tax payments) and a government budget surplus.
There is some disagreement about what counts as saving. For example, the part of a person’s income that is spent on mortgage loan repayments is not spent on present consumption and is therefore saving by the above definition, even though people do not always think of repaying a loan as saving. However, in the U.S. measurement of the numbers behind its gross national product (i.e., the National Income and Product Accounts), personal interest payments are not treated as “saving” unless the institutions and people who receive them save them.
“Saving” differs from “savings.” The former refers to an increase in one’s assets, an increase in net worth, whereas the latter refers to one part of one’s assets, usually deposits in savings accounts, or to all of one’s assets. Saving refers to an activity occurring over time, a flow variable, whereas savings refers to something that exists at any one time, a stock variable. (Wikipedia Feb 2010)