How to learn to save in 7 days and reinforce the habit

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

A short challenge that will change the way you think about money.

Unfortunately, saving is not cycling, and the principle “once learned, you will never forget” does not work. Saving money is a long process that grows overgrown with personal life hacks and traditions that make general rules more effective.

Saving is a habit.

And a habit is formed in 21 days. This period is divided into several important stages:

1. The first day - you started to act.
2. Day 2 - You have completed the task again.
3. Seven days - you have not deviated from your plans and on weekends, which seem to be created to arrange a rest for yourself from all obligations.
4. Day 21 - the habit is consolidated and becomes conscious.

The life hacker offers seven simple but working rules that you just need to make a habit - one for each day. Try doing them throughout the week to understand the basics of saving money. If you like it, repeat the tasks for another two weeks to consolidate the result.

Saving is not necessarily boring and boring, if you perceive it as a game in which you get coins for winning, and not virtual ones.

Day 1. Expenses

Savings would be wise to compare to a diet that aims to gain weight. For the arrow of the scale to swing to the right, you need to consume more calories than you spend. Accordingly, in order for the amount of money to increase due to savings, you need to spend it less than you receive. Moreover, it is important to know what they are spending on.

If you do not keep track of expenses, then you do not know how much you spend and what exactly.

Even if you live according to your income and therefore know approximately the amount you are spending, the structure of expenses may surprise you unpleasantly. Therefore, it is worth starting to introduce the habit of saving by fixing all expenses.

Exercise

Install an expense tracking application on your phone. The life hacker wrote about the best ones - just choose the one that suits you. Write down every ruble spent throughout the day.

Do not throw out checks in stores, but put them in a special pocket of your bag. Then on them it will be easy to restore the picture of spending.

Day 2. Income

A very simple question: how much money do you have right now? Taking into account the funds on the card, savings, placers of euro cents left after the trip, stash for a rainy day in a box, little things in your pockets, coins rolled under the sofa?

If you know the exact answer, you are an economy guru. And you are reading this text just to make sure once again how cool you are in everything related to finance. Well, or you have 437 rubles left in your pocket before your salary, and therefore it was easy to calculate. But usually a person can answer this question very roughly, and this is fundamentally wrong.

The adage that money loves an account did not arise from scratch, and there is not an ounce of superstition in it - only a practical clue.

You can plan your expenses as much as you want, but it will only be effective if you know everything about your income and the state of your accounts. Therefore, you must have information about your money, not only in cases when there is practically no money left and you need to survive at any cost.

Exercise

First, record all your earnings. Cash birthday gifts, envelopes from your grandmother, tax deductions - all these are receipts that must be taken into account.

If your salary consists of a salary and a floating bonus, you are a freelancer, the organization pays an additional thirteenth salary or quarterly bonuses, it is important for you to understand your average monthly income. Collect all payments from the last year and calculate how much you can expect on average every 30 days. Look at what month and what was the maximum income, what contributed to this. When and what was the minimum income: why, whether this situation will happen again and whether this amount is enough for life.

Freelancers can remember everything with information about the movement of funds on accounts and correspondence with customers in messengers.

After that, think about all your money, even those that were lying around in the pockets of winter jackets. Finally, figure out how much money you have in total.

By the way, everything that was found in unexpected places, it is better to immediately send to the piggy bank. You still did not know anything about this money and did not count on it, so parting with it will be painless.

Day 3. Motivation

If you make savings a goal, you will quickly get bored of the process. You limit yourself in various pleasant things, spend time trying to figure out your finances, and what do you get in return? It's time to make savings a tool and think about what goals it will help you achieve.

What do you want to get financially? For some, the goal will be to live to a paycheck without debt. Someone needs to accumulate an airbag for a job change or relocation. Others set ambitious goals like buying a car.

Miracles do not happen: you will not be able to save money on an expensive car or apartment in the center of Moscow.

But the accumulated, for example, can become a start for starting your own business - in this case, it is not at all necessary to have millions. And already the income from the business will fulfill the dream.

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Decide on your financial goals. Be guided by rational arguments, but do not force yourself into a rigid framework. You yourself can give up on your desires, because you are afraid to think too globally.

When the goal is clear, decide on a long-term strategy. How much money do you need? And is it possible to get them simply by cutting costs? If not, decide what to do to make the dream a reality.

If you take the matter seriously, you can expect bitter discoveries that will force you to reconsider your life.

Or they won't. But a long-term strategy is a good thing anyway to help set benchmarks.

At the same time, it is wrong to define a financial goal once and for all. Return to it periodically, recalculate money, revise options, weigh the relevance of desires. This is a good habit not only for the financial sector: the sooner you realize that you are doing something wrong, the easier it will be to change everything.

Day 4. Finding ways to save

To save money, it is not enough today to abandon a purchase. In this matter, you need to think systematically. So, if you buy a new game for 1,000 rubles, it will not hit your pocket as hard as chocolates for 50 rubles that you buy every day. You will spend 1,500 rubles on sweets per month, and 18 thousand per year.

There are two steps to looking for ways to save money:

1. Deal with spending habits that are pulling money out of you: take away coffee, go to business lunch instead of bringing lunch from home, smoke. Just counting how much money is wasted is a great motivator.
2. Eliminate unnecessary background waste. For example, you pay monthly for your home phone because you are too lazy to walk in and turn it off. Or your Internet tariff is not the most profitable at a mediocre speed. Or, water is constantly dripping from the tap, taking your money down the drain.

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Think, remember, analyze which items of expenditure can be reduced or eliminated. To seed, start with one bad financial habit and one background expense, and add new ones every week. At the end of the 21-day challenge, that would be three habits and three background expenditures, not bad, right?

Day 5. Lists

As you already understood, saving and planning are inextricably linked. Therefore, you need to learn to think ahead and, of course, make lists and schedules.

The most obvious one is the shopping list. Firstly, this way you will not forget to buy something you need in a hypermarket with reasonable prices, so that later you will not purchase it at an exorbitant price in a store near your home. Secondly, with such a list it is easier not to buy unnecessary items.

Another example is a financial calendar in which you set reminders for when to pay utility bills so that there are no fines, to pay a loan, and so on.

The lists are individual, so just watch yourself. If in some situation you say to yourself: “It's better to remember or write it down,” then this can be the beginning of a full-fledged action plan.

Exercise

Start with two lists - next week's menu and shopping list.

Think carefully about all meals and snacks. In doing so, focus on your preferences and the possibility of cooking in the middle of the week. For example, you won't have time in the evenings. This means that on Sunday it is necessary either to cook food for the whole week, or to make semi-finished products so that they only need to be reheated. At the same time, you are ready to eat some dishes for years, while others get bored every other day. It is logical to add the first ones to the menu.

In your shopping list, add the items you need to prepare meals from the menu and are not at home. Check the shelves in the kitchen and bathroom. You may find that something else needs to be added to the list.

Make it a habit to immediately add running out products and supplies to your shopping list.

In the future, it is worth considering what other lists could reduce the financial burden. This could be, for example, an app with photographs of clothes, so that in a store it quickly becomes clear that you don't need a seventh white shirt.

Day 6. Budgeting

It is no coincidence that organizations plan a budget that includes all expenses and revenues. This, in particular, helps to avoid difficult situations. So, on the second day of the challenge, you marked the periods with the highest and lowest income. If in the second case it was a really small amount, perhaps you thought: "Oh, that would be to move part of the income from the" fat "month to the unprofitable …"

The beauty of a budget is that it can be done with it.

Let's say you're a freelancer who works on a piece-work basis. The dangerous months for you are January and May, because they have a lot of days off. Accordingly, in February and June, finance will sing romances. But with the budget, you take this into account and go through unprofitable months without problems. Another example: you have enough money back to back only for vital expenses, and the need to pay a tax of 10 thousand is unsettling. But you have planned your budget and set aside a little less than 1,000 rubles each month in advance. This is less painful than spending a significant amount of your monthly salary right away.

In short, the budget is a very useful financial document, and everyone needs it.

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You have just started getting to know your finances, so it will be difficult to draw up a full-fledged budget for now. Start with a monthly and yearly financial plan layout. Try to remember all the expenses, compare them with income.

With a ready-made layout, it will be much easier for you to improve your budget and make changes to it in the future, because the global goal is to make it a habit.

Day 7. Date with money

If you are hoping to start a long-term relationship with money, you will have to arrange regular dates with them. Plan a day and hour in your weekly schedule to devote to finance.

Ideally, you should do the following at this time:

1. Check the correctness of the records of all expenses, sort the receipts.
2. Analyze spending. Find out which of them were necessary, which were spontaneous, and which arose through an oversight (they forgot a bottle of water at home, had to buy a new one).
3. Record weekly earnings, if any.
4. Start a new shopping list for the week.
5. Calculate your weekly savings, save that money, or transfer it to a savings account.
6. Make adjustments to the budget.

Over time, there will be more things to do for a financial date, but you will complete them faster - this is the magic power of habit.

Exercise

If you've made it for a week, you've passed an important milestone. Your smartphone stores records of all expenses, and it's time to analyze them.

Do not flatter yourself: they will most likely be all right. People at the beginning of their journey are extremely disciplined.

However, even these almost ideal items of expenditure will tell you a lot. Analyze spending and think about how to adjust it in the future.

This will be enough for the first week, but in the future, add new financial tasks to the list.

Days to come. Developing a habit

Repeat the start week twice more with new conditions. And three times is better, because a month will give more comprehensive data about your finances. And you will find that saving is much easier for you.