Are you having a tough time saving money? You might have good intentions when it comes to saving but you get easily distracted and buy things you really don’t need? We’ve talked in the past about various ways to save money. Today, I am going to offer another strategy for those still having a hard time with saving.
It is a trick I’ve used my entire life but really never took notice of until recently. I was out with a friend and we were talking about life and money and getting ahead. When we got on the topic of saving money, he admitted that he was having a hard time putting money away.
As we talked, I realized he had the desire to save, he just needed to find the motivation to help him save as much as he could so he could reach his financial goals.
I started talking about how much my wife and I save and he was curious how we were able to put away close to 40% of our income a year. I started off explaining to him that it was just something we did, when I realized I was using a trick that might help him out.
The Trick To Motivate You To Save More
To encourage me to save, I look at how much money I made at the end of the year. Not from my salary for working a job, but the money I made through interest and dividends. When I total up this number, I get excited to try to have it grow more next year, which is mainly accomplished by saving more money.
But when I started to take this number one step further, I was even more motivated to save as much as I could. I took the amount earned through interest and dividends and divided it by 365, the number of days in a year. The resulting number is how much money I made on a given day.
For example, let’s say you earned $8,000 last year in interest and dividends. If you take that and divide by 365 you end up with $21.92.
This means that you earned $21.92 every day just for saving money. Put another way, you made $21.92 by doing nothing. On any given Saturday throughout the year, you got up, maybe did some work around the house and then got caught up on Game of Thrones. You made $21.92 and you did nothing really.
Using This Trick For Your Benefit
So I encourage you to take 15 minutes and look at how much money you earned last year through interest and dividends. You could go through each month and total them up or you could just look at your tax return.
If using your tax return, look at lines 8a, 8b, 9a and 9b. Total them up to get your number. Then divide by 365. Once you have this number, post it where you will see it so that you are reminded that you make $X every day for doing nothing else but saving some money.
Then use it to your advantage to motivate you to save more money. The more you save, the more that number will increase. And thanks to compound interest, the interest you earn will grow larger and faster as your interest earned starts earning you interest as well.
Final Thoughts
Getting back to my friend, he was excited about this trick when I explained to him. That was two weeks ago. He recently texted me saying when he got home, he calculated his daily earnings to be $12.00. While it wasn’t a huge amount, it was more than he thought it would be.
He has already gone ahead and started looking at his expenses and transferring money to savings as he tries to grow this amount.
For some reading this, the trick outlined here might be what you need to help you start saving more money. Take a few minutes to see how much money you earn in a given day by doing nothing and work to save more so you can earn even more by doing nothing.
