Saving money for times when you have to buy something expensive or when you don’t earn as much money for a period of time for whatever reason, is important. If you can build yourself a buffer that can support your life for at least half a year, you can start saving money for fun things like vacation, a party, or a new car. Before that time however, that buffer should really be the priority in our opinion. Today we will share tricks and tips that help us save money and you might just learn something new.
Get an overview of your spending and income
Make a list of what comes into your bank account and what you spend. We do this in an Excel sheet where we keep track of this for every month separate. If you take the mean of multiple months you have a good idea of your current situation. Maybe you’ll find some expenses surprisingly high and you might be able to lower this. The first step is creating awareness, only then can you do something about it.
Make your goals visual
For our saving goals we tend to use a sheet where we can color the dots if we saved some money. There are 50 dots on the sheet and you can fill in your goal amount. Then every dot stands for a certain amount of money. Every time when we saved that amount of money we can fill in a dot. When the sheet is full we have saved our goal amount! Making your goal visual helps to keep you motivated and it gives you a visual of how far/close the goal is from your current state.
Set an automatic payment to your savings account
Saving money has to be a priority and not something you do when there’s money left. Don’t set these payments too high, decide for yourself what you can save every month. By automatically puting a certain amount in your savings account every month, you’re more likely to actually save it as you’ll feel like it’s already gone/spend. However if the amount you’re saving each month is too high you will end up transferring the money back to your checking account or you will lower your own quality of life when you don’t have enough money left. So be wary of not pushing yourself to far.
Do you want more helpful tips for saving money? We made some articles about saving money on groceries, definitely check part 1 and part 2 out!
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