Save A Lot: Why Saving Money Can Be Easier Than You Think

How many times have you heard just how easy it is to save money? The whole idea is simplified to the point that you feel guilty, bad or ashamed at most of the fact that you can’t follow in the footsteps of all these financial gurus. Instead, you’re struggling to save money, and the sad part is you make more than you should be spending. That’s right, you sat down and wrote out that all-important budget and the result was your income is higher than what your expenses are, but yet you still end up in the negative by the end of the month. Why exactly is that happening? Well, you can be confident that your budget is flawed at best and you’re probably leaving off plenty of incidental line items such as daily expenses or meals out to eat in restaurants for example as for why you’re off based on what your actual debt to income ratio is. Are your forgetting to add car repairs, shopping trips for clothing allowances or anything else that isn’t listed as gas bill, cable or phone? In addition to overlooking expenses, can you honestly say you’re trying to save money above and beyond recreating a budget that works? Saving money doesn’t have to mean deprivation or getting rid of that aforementioned shopping trip or waiting for those car repairs. What it translates into is finding ways to save money in apparent and less obvious places. Your cable and cell phone bills are easy to see as being culprits and can easily be paired down with a little work on your part and rethinking how you watch television (stream, stream, stream). You also can look long and hard at how you eat, what you eat but more importantly where you shop for food. Shopping smart for food includes coupons, following sales and buying the generic version of some products when they’ll do just fine, regardless. And speaking of generic or gravitating toward the simple, you might want to think about the idea that you should be putting aside money via an automatic transfer from checking to savings when you get paid. Setting aside and automating that transfer is money in the bank literally, and doing just $50 per paycheck means you’ll save $1200 per year just by telling the bank you want your own money into another account. Declaring that saving money is simple is easy but delivering can be a bit trickier only if you aren’t searching out ways to actually deliver as promised.

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