How to Save if I Don’t Earn Much

The first thing you mus realize is that saving does not necessarily depend on your income.

Have you ever noticed someone from your job or even from your own family, who despite earning less than you seems calmer about finances and seems to consistently hit larger financial achievements? First things first, don’t compare yourself to them. You never know the whole story and it sets you up to steal your own joy.

On a more positive note (at least on their end), they probably save whereas you don’t – yet. They have come to understand how to save, regardless of their income. In fact, I’m sure you also know people who earn much more money than you and do not save; clearly this is not because they do not have the capacity, but because they lack two key elements to save: discipline and perseverance.

Nobody was born with “the gift” of saving, it is not in their DNA. The ability to save is something that everyone has if they set their mind to it, you just need a few mental exercises to develop the habit of saving.

How to save if I earn little money?

From the outset, the first thing you should do is set your sights on ; After that, these simple tips can help you:

1. Think before making a purchase: Do you really need this? if so, is there a way you can negotiate it, or find it elsewhere or later for cheaper? just pausing to ask yourself this regularly will lead to some quick and easy savings.
2. Allocate a part of your monthly income to savings: A trick that worked in order to do this was to agree on paying myself first. On each paycheck (even from my side hustle) I would immediately stash away 20% for savings. No questions asked. Unspendable. After a year of doing this, my life style had not changed, and I had managed to save enough to cover more than 3 months of expenses in the event of an emergency.
3. Keep a goal in mind: The time when I saved the most money in the shortest amount of time was when I had the goal of moving out from my parents house before turning 28. I just had to get an apartment that bad. Visualizing the massive win it would be to have my own place allowed me to continue the perceived “sacrifice” of saving long term.
4. Be organized: I can’t give advice on this one. Still working on it for myself.
5. Resist the temptation to compulsive shopping: For me it became easy to do this when thinking in terms of 5 or 10x my mindless purchases. A $10 burger quickly becomes $80-100 in expenses; it’s not uncommon for many young people to spend this or more in a month on fast food or mindless buys. You could have saved this.
6. Look for opportunities to cut expenses: consider your recurring expenses. Where can you cut something? Maybe it would be cheaper to offer a friend or coworker money every month for rides rather than to continue riding Uber or public transport. Maybe you don’t need Netflix, nor Amazon Prime.
7. Do not spend more than necessary: Every dollar saved is a dollar earned. Look around you right now. How many things around you did you buy and haven’t used for a while now? Think about how much you would have saved in the last 5 years if you had not spent on these objects.

If you think that the above tips are not going to help you, think about the small expenses that you make every day, and that over time add up to large amounts of your income.

You do not have to start by opening a bank account, to start saving you just have to have a piggy bank – if it does not open easily, even better – and once you fill it then you can think about opening a savings bank account.

Cent by cent you will see that you can collect interesting amounts of money, without it meaning you incur greater expenses and without affecting your quality of life.

The most important thing is that having filled that bank account you have already started to form a saving habit that will allow you to build towards that financial freedom and legacy of wealth.