My wife and I always seem to make a lot of big life changes at the same time. For instance, in the span of 40 long hours, we each started new jobs, sold a house, bought another house, and moved. That was probably 40 of the most difficult and exciting hours of my life.
Even when we first got married, we waited only two weeks after our wedding to buy our first house. Just like any young, newly married couple, we did not have a lot of money saved (we had not participated in the easiest saving challenge ever). We also were not extremely experienced at fixing things around the house.
At that time, I considered hanging a picture as one of my top skills with tools.
Something always breaks when you buy a house
After we moved in and hung up a couple of pictures, I went to take a shower and realized that there wasn’t any hot water coming out of the showerhead. Fortunately, I knew enough to realize that the hot water heater probably wasn’t working well, but I didn’t know enough to actually fix it.
After calling my father and my father-in-law and poking around in the basement like I knew what I was doing, I decided to give up and call a repairman. He looked at the hot water heater and told us that we would need to get a new one. He also told us that it would cost around $700.
$700 for a hot water heater! For me, that was a ton of money.
I suppose that it was a lot of money because I was just starting out in my career and my wife was still student teaching. But it was also a lot of money because we didn’t have any money saved. As many people tend to do, we had spent all of our money on our wedding and the honeymoon and we didn’t have any money left.
No matter what, spending $700 on an unexpected repair bill is annoying. But, repair bills are much more annoying when there isn’t any money saved to pay for the repair!
Then and now
Since my wife and I have some money saved now, repair bills are less of an annoyance. They still are rough, but repairs are much easier to deal with than they were before.
However, saving can be real tough, especially when we are first starting.
When we are just starting, saving can be almost impossible, which is probably why so many people don’t have any money saved at all.
Start a savings challenge by creating a habit
To make saving or anything in our lives easier, we have to make it a habit. For instance, the first time someone goes running, she may only make it halfway down the block before she stops and slowly drags herself back home.
However, if the new runner can somehow find the willpower to drag herself out of the house the next day, she may make it two blocks before she has to quit. After three weeks of finding willpower to get out and run, she may find herself actually looking forward to putting on her shoes and going out for a two mile run. She may have never thought that it would be possible to run or even walk two miles, but running is now a habit.
And habits are easy to keep!
We shower, brush our teeth, and put clothes on everyday. These things are simple because they are habits.
Saving money is tough … but it doesn’t have to be so tough if we make it a habit. If we make it a habit to save money every single week, then the first 4 weeks will be tough, but after awhile it will get much easier.
Here’s the easiest saving challenge ever:
Tomorrow, let’s take $5 from our wallet or withdraw it from our bank. Then, let’s put this money in a shoebox or lockbox in our closet.
Sweet . . . we just saved $5!!!
But we can’t stop there! Next week, we need to continue the habit by putting $10 into the same shoebox. The habit is still real tough because we may have to go to the bank and remember to get the money out, but we have to do it.
Remember that habits are real tough to start!
Now we are in week three, so we have to put $15 into the shoebox. Make sure that you save this money because you are starting to build the habit muscle. Just like week 3 of running, the habit is still really new, but we may start to be enjoying the habit a little bit.
Week four means that you will put a crisp, $20 bill into the shoebox.
Don’t look now, but you have just saved $50!!!
- Week 1: $5
- Week 2: $10
- Week 3: $15
- Week 4: $20
The habit has started
The one thing that you can’t do now is spend this money! We are building up the habit muscles and they are starting to look pretty good in the mirror! We can’t sabotage our progress by spending. Instead, we have to keep exercising our habit muscles.
By now, maybe you have set a reminder in your phone calendar to make sure that you keep putting money in that shoebox. Or you put a note on your fridge to remind you. Either way, you are making sure that you keep saving money every week.
For week five, you can either continue to save $20 or you can go up to $25. Obviously, $25 will allow you to increase your savings quicker, but you may not be able to afford this amount yet. Maybe put all $1 bills into the shoebox this week, just to see the stack of cash grow.
Isn’t it cool to have a visual reminder of our saving!
The shoebox is getting full
Now that we have made it a habit to save money, it is easy to save $20 or even more every week. As long as we keep putting this money in our shoebox, we will have around $250 in there after only 3 or 4 months.
As much as I would like to see us continue to grow this pile of cash in the shoebox, this is probably an appropriate time to open a savings account and to deposit some of this money into the account. We don’t want to lose this money, so it is important to protect it in a savings account.
I keep any extra cash that I have in an online bank called Capital One 360. Keeping it there allows me to earn one of the top interest rates around. There also is a sign-up bonus of $25 if you open an account though this link and deposit at least $250. To find out more about this bank, you can click here for a short review that I have written.
Whether you open your savings account at Capital One 360 or at another online bank, keep putting $20 or more into your shoebox each week and moving this money to your online bank account when you have $250 or so in the shoebox.
From this small habit that you will start this week, you will have at least $1,010 after one year! Now when an emergency comes along, you will have the funds to handle it!
Please let us know if you are going to participate in the easiest savings challenge ever by checking out the comments. I just put $5 into a shoebox, and I am excited to watch it grow!
And thanks for reading!
~Nathan
Let’s keep living a great life … with the help of money. So what’s next?
- You can travel for free by using rewards credit cards.
- You can get motivated and get out of debt.
- You can check out the next post or the previous post and continue to learn.
But no matter what you decide to do, let’s leave the ordinary behind and take action today!
