Pain Mistaken: Is Saving Money Really That Difficult?

If you ask the average person about money, you’ll get a fairly typical response: the eye roll or, even worse, the head buried in the hands.

No matter which one you see, they’re translated the same way. Saving money isn’t fun. In fact, you could argue that saving money is downright tricky.

But does it always have to be?

The reason we believe that saving money is hard is, quite frankly, we make it more difficult than it needs to be. That isn’t to suggest that putting money aside or dealing with the unexpected expense can’t sting from time to time, but this is more about the day to day, month to month saving and making sure you’re not simply overthinking it.

Now, most experts will tell you that the key to saving money is to live beneath your means and cleanly (a term suggesting that you buy only what you need and not so much what you want). This all makes perfect sense, but living beneath your means doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, now, does it?

Instead of looking at it from the glass half empty perspective, try to look at it as more of a schedule of priorities. For example, if you’re interested in saving money, why buy a house that is too big and expensive for you to enjoy. Perhaps living in a smaller, less expensive apartment is the better option, along with partaking in a car or truck that is modest, but not necessarily a clunker, either.

The idea behind saving is to live modestly and within your means, so that at the end of the day you have about five percent of your total income available to put into a savings account (this is excluding the pretax contribution you should be making, again another four percent or so to retirement).

Also, having a budget helps immensely, mostly because it allows you to have line by line items of what you are spending your money on consistently. Do you know how often a budget says you have $500 leftover at the end of the month, only to find that you’re actually at break even? The reason being is most budgeting is so flimsy and broad that it fails to capture true spending and instead is more of a cookie cutter approach (i.e., car, house, insurance and utilities only, for example).

While saving money is no cake walk, it doesn’t have to be painstakingly difficult, either. You have to understand that your income dictates where and how you live, what you own and buy but never should tell you how much you should be saving. That number is set, and it’s up to you to work around it.