Many people are beginning to cope with cutting back indulgences to save more money, but still, many have trouble with saving money. Is saving money difficult for you? If you have trouble saving money, then the solution may be as simple as changing your perspective on saving.
Saving Money Requires Too Many Changes
A lot of people associate saving money with taking a drastic hit to the quality of life. This might be true for a small handful, but generally, any activities that you enjoy doing can be done more cheaply, or even replaced with something that is cheaper, and often more healthy. If you aren’t willing to alter your activities, then altering small spending habits can easily amount to a decent savings.
Everyone has heard about the “Starbucks” example. Cut out the daily coffee, or make your own coffee and that money will add up..
Saving Money Is Like Taking A Pay Cut
Again, this tends to be a quality of life argument, but don’t think of saving money as “taking a pay cut.” What you are doing is increasing your future income. In our article about exponential income, we discussed how so many people spend their money now and rob themselves of future interest income. If you don’t give your money the chance to grow, then it will never yield any real fruit.
If you feel like saving money is going to hurt you, then your mindset is stuck on the now when it should be focused on the later. Should you live like a hermit now? We aren’t saying that, but we do believe that you should live like tomorrow may arrive. We agree that tomorrow is definitely not guaranteed, but living like it won’t will guarantee only one thing: a miserable retirement where your body will be too old and used up to provide adequately for yourself.
Live Life To The Fullest
In philosophy this an excellent rule of thumb, but its meaning has been bastardized to the point of meaninglessness by consumerism in the hopes that you’ll spend your money without thought, that you’ll “spoil yourself just this once” (isn’t that a cute phrase?) for the third time this week, and that you “deserve” your dream car now. These new words of wisdom are spoken by every person and their brother in an attempt to justify having no plans for the future. If you use this phrase to remind you to enjoy the wonderful things in life, good for you, anything other than that is worthless hot air used to justify irresponsibility.
All Things Considered
With all of those things considered, I’m going to leave you with a few excellent quotes (not mine) to remind you of how important saving is:
- The poor think about today, the rich think about tomorrow and the poor spend for today, while the rich save for tomorrow
And be sure to never forget:
- “Then Jesus said to his disciples, “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt 19:23)
- No man is rich enough to buy back his past. –Oscar Wilde
What about you? Do you have trouble saving? Are you a successful saver? What helps you to save for tomorrow?
