How to crank up your savings habits
We can get into a good routine to increase our savings without having to hole-up and pinch pennies. We just need to get into our savings groove.
Check out a few life hacks to get that groove going and grow our savings each month.
Snowballing your money
Once we’ve created a budget, we can look back a few months and see if we’ve over budgeted for anything. Maybe we’re not buying as much coffee as we thought, or we’ve found a much cheaper grocery store. We can add up what we’re not spending and start moving that amount into our savings each month instead. Maybe it’s $25, $50 or even $100. Once we see how quickly our money snowballs, we’ll be more likely to want to keep going. (If you haven’t created a budget yet, check out our handy budget worksheet here).
It’s great to automate
The easiest (and sometimes the only) way we’re going to save is doing it without lifting a finger. We can create an automated transfer that pulls money from our checking account and put it in our savings every time we get paid. This will eliminate the natural tendency we all have to spend money that’s sitting in our checking account.
Putting out the fire in your pocket
It can be tempting to take those unexpected inflows of cash - birthdays, bonuses, tax refunds - and go on a little shopping spree. But we’ll be masters of our money if we take advantage of these moments and add the money to our savings. Adding these windfalls can give us a big boost in reaching those goals we have, like becoming “emergency-proof” or saving for a house, car, or vacation. And it keeps it from burning a hole in our pocket.
Becoming the master of our money doesn’t have to be a daunting challenge. These life hacks can help us build a little momentum toward our savings goal. Once we get the ball rolling, we just may find it hard to stop.
Get more great savings tips in our Emergency-Proof ebook.
