When I look at people who have seen success with handling their money. There are usually a few themes that come up. Watched their spending. Didn’t go crazy. Looked for discounts. But the one that I see the most is that they automated their savings.
If you want to get better at saving money and living better the first thing you should do is make it automatic.
Automate Everything
If there is one thing that has made a difference in my life it’s automating my savings. From having investment amounts come out through pre-authorized accounts, to having my savings come out for other things in our money system. Automation has been the big difference maker.
A Great Example of Automating
Here’s an example. When we decided to go to Disney next year we figured we would need to save about $20 a day at that point up to the trip. Rather than try and figure out when to do it I opened up a separate account and set an automatic transfer to go from our Living account to a special Big Ticket account (a.k.a. Disney). (These are seem of therm we use in our money system which you should sign up for because it’s free and it changed our lives)
Every week $140 comes out. I notice the money coming out but I also expect it. After half a year that account will be around $3600. Sure there have been some tight moments but we have worked around them. This is way easier than figuring out where that money is going to come from at the end of the year (which let’s face it, would end up being a line of credit, which is totally not happening).
Why Automating Is So Powerful?
First of all it takes the decision making process out of your mind. You make one decision and set in motion. Then you switch to monitoring. This is awesome.
Second of all, it runs in the background. You don’t have to think about it, one less decision. Did you remember to save your 20% of your check this month? Yep, I did it automatically.
Did you remember to pay your bill this month? Yep came out automatically. There is a lot of power in doing this. You aren’t having to remember as much, which means that you can use that brainpower for something better. Like oh I don’t know, reading your favourite financial blogs 🙂
Here is my plan if you are wanting to get better with money
Automate. Automate. Automate.
Anything that you could train a lobotomized monkey to do, you should automate. It’s just easier for you.
Automate your savings
Automate your bill payments
Automate your debt repayments.
Get a plan and make it automatic. You’ll find it’s autoMAGIC.
Peace out my friends.
If would like to know more about the money system I use I would strongly recommend you sign up for our free 7 day email course that walks you through the details of the system I used to turn my life around. Find out more about the Budget that Changed My Life
