When we do our surveys on our website, the vast majority of respondents write that saving money is extremely important, and many have been doing so for a long time.
However, there are always those who clearly understand that they don’t need to spend all of their income, but still continue to do so.
So how do you get started?
At our school, we always follow the principle of small steps. This means that we divide any business into small steps that can easily be done in the near future. It is clear that people want to save in order to achieve lofty goals – paying for their children’s school fees, buying a house or a car, a financially secure life in retirement.
Such big goals seem so ambitious and unattainable, and so it is difficult to start, to take the first step. Well, what is, for example, saving 50 or 100 dollars, when the goal is, say, 120,000.
But every month, every week and even every day of delay costs you a lost income, such as interest income from your savings.
The technique itself
The technique, which adherents we, the team Fingram, are called the method of small steps and is that we make small steps on the way to our goal, but repeated and often. For example, we set aside $10, but every day. By the way, over the course of a year, that will accumulate 3,650, or 3,660 if the year is a leap year. A simple amount and a simple step, repeated 365 times brings the amount many times greater than that $10.
The amount, of course, can be any. For example, right now on Instagram we, along with our subscribers, are playing a game called the 52 week challenge. The challenge is to set aside an amount of money corresponding to the number of the week plus 1 zero. Week 1 is $10, Week 2 is $20, Week 52 is 520.
The small amounts seem to add up to a relatively large sum of $13780.
We have a bit of a game changer, as December has the highest amounts – $490,500,510,520. Every week we show subscribers a randomly chosen number to put aside. This is how we take the load off of December, when everyone already has a lot of spending – gifts, trips.
What makes us especially happy is that some subscribers set aside the right amount back in February, two months after we started our savings marathon. Not only does this method really work, but it’s also addictive – once you start, you can’t stop. The example of our participants who collected the full amount ahead of time proves this.
Where do we get the money to save from?
This is a very good question that we sometimes get asked. We, by the way, periodically write in the same Instagram account in the column about effective savings.
Money can be allocated in two ways.
Start working on expenses.
Start working on income.
Often we make spending on automatic, out of habit. Rustam, our co-founder, in our column about effective savings, for example, likes to tell the story of how he spent December 30th standing in endless traffic jams in Moscow, habitually renting a business class car, though he could drive an hour in a car comfort + dedicated lane. I would have saved both time and money, and I would not have been late for dinner with my family.
If we paid attention to where our money was going at least once a week, we could save a large sum.
So the technique with which to find money to save is the “periodically save effectively” technique.
A cooler way is of course to form the habit of saving money and the habit of thinking about spending, not spending everything on automatic.
But it is better to start with something simple:
- set aside small amounts, but daily.
- Periodically asking yourself: “is it worth making such a purchase?” Why did we say at the beginning of the article that even a month of delay is worth losing money? After all, $10 is not a big deal, so how can it affect your capital in the future?
We will deal with this question in the second part of our article.