Saving money is a hard goal to achieve if you don’t have a specific motivation behind it. If you’re having trouble finding the motivation to set aside money from your pay, try the Cancun Technique.
Picture: droneplcr
As personal finance blog Studenomics points out, saving money for specific goals is easier than saving just to save. If you want to plan a holiday to Cancun, you can set a target amount, decide how much you need to save each month, and even get excited about doing it. When you’re saving because some article on the internet made you feel guilty about spending all your money, it’s going to be a little harder. Rather than saving because writers online say you need to eat your vegetables, give yourself a specific, tangible goal for the money you want to save:
When you want something, you’ll save up for it. If you don’t want something, you’ll create excuses. Yes, in the perfect world you’re going to have an emergency fund. In real life, you need something to get you excited.
Of course, some goals may be easier to create than others. An easy way to do this may be to tack an extra $1000 on to your holiday budget in order to trick yourself into building an emergency fund (as long as you don’t blow through it on your trip). Saving for retirement may be harder, since the payoff won’t come for a long time, but if you can give yourself specific things you’d like to do when you retire, you can give yourself a little more motivation to do it.
Why Your Bank Account is Depressing (The Cancun Technique For Saving Money) [Studenomics via Rockstar Finance]
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