As you may have noticed a large number of my posts recently have been regarding using up items i already own. Part of the reason for this is due to the great number of similarities between using up products and saving. Aside from the obvious one, where using what you own rather than buying new, there are other ways that using items up mimics saving money.
I explained in my last post that the momentum of using up items was addicting, but when a lull occured it was very difficult to maintain that level of excitement. This is the same thing that occurs with me when i put money into my savings account. When i constantly get to see the amount of money in the account grow i am more motivated to help it continue to grow. However, at the slightest hiccup i tend to lose interest in saving money and would prefer to spend it else where. This is not to say that i think spending the money would be a wise idea, i know it would serve better to save, i just lose the momentum i worked to create.
It was actually my mom that gave me an excellent idea of a way to maintain the saving (or paying off debt) momentum. My mother had heard from a co-worker of something she called the 10 dollar rule. Every time the woman would get 10 dollar bills back from a purchase as change she would set them aside to be put into the bank. This idea initially seemed like a very good idea to me, however i knew it would need to be tweaked to better fit my lifestyle. Since i am usually spending 20 dollar bills, a 10 dollar chunk of that seems rather large. The next possibility i thought of would be to would be to use singles as the denomination i would save. This seemed like a pretty easy saving technique except that food service at my school tends to consist of vending machines so those dollars become very valuable.
I finally ended up settling on 5 dollar bills as the denomination i should save, this i found created a happy medium between how much i was saving, while maximizing the amount of money i would still have to spend on food. Since i currently only earn about 100 dollars a month (an allowance from my parents) i need to save most of that for bill payment and food costs. That being said, i do not want to leave me savings account “dormant” while i work through my debt. Since beginning to follow the 5 dollar rule i have saved over 30 dollars! While it has currently been about 2 months since i started applying the rule 15 dollars a month towards savings is much better than zero.
How do you keep your momentum for saving up? Will you be using the 10-dollar rule, and if you do will you tweak it like i did?
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