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This post was originally published February 17, 2017. Here is the new and improved version!

Fool-Proofing Savings for Guaranteed Financial Success

Have you ever started a new diet or fitness regimen you were really excited about?

You promise yourself you’re going to follow the new plan to the letter (after all, you know it’s good for you). But then a few weeks in, the excitement wears off. The first week you had willpower of steel, able to say no to the break room doughnuts and always find time for your workout. But once the novelty is gone, you realize your willpower sucks.

You can’t trust your willpower!

Same with personal finance. You start the journey determined to cut back on spending and stoked to faithfully save your set amount each paycheck. But that excitement wears off pretty quickly, and you find you need more than willpower to accomplish your goal.

You need a foolproof plan for guaranteed financial success, and we can help!

 

Your expenses grow with your income, so you will never have “enough” money

Here’s the thing: no one ever has enough money to do everything they want. Ever.

When you’re just starting out, you want enough money to furnish your apartment. If you’re financially stable, you want enough money to remodel your kitchen. And when you’re well off, you want enough money to enroll your kids in the elite schools.

Even when you’re freakin Bill Gates, you want enough money to provide clean water to the entire African Continent. There is never enough money!

We see women all the time who wait to save money because they don’t think they make enough to start saving now. They think they will have more to save after this current phase in their lives and all the financial challenges.

Don’t fall for that! The next phase of your life will come with a whole new set of expenses, and the more money you have, the more expenses you’ll find!

You will never have enough money, so start saving now!

 

Relying on willpower is a recipe for failure

Willpower is great, but it’s in short supply.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve beat myself up for a lack of willpower. Overslept, procrastinated on a project, ate an extra cookie (or three), failed to go to the gym.

When you have choices, it’s really easy to make the wrong ones, the ones that directly go against your goals! The solution? Eliminate the choices.

Schedule an unmissable meeting for the early morning, and you can’t sleep in! Create a firm deadline for a project to force yourself to work on it immediately. Keep cookies out of the house, and you can’t eat 7 of them. I’m still working on fool-proofing going to the gym 🙂

But that’s exactly what we do with savings: eliminate the choice! Keep the money out of your hands. If you don’t have it, you can’t spend it.

Enter automation! Your bank can automatically transfer money to your savings accounts each paycheck so you don’t have to! This offers guaranteed financial success by eliminating the option to not save.

 

Using Automation for Guaranteed Financial Success

If you don’t already have your 3 Barrel Savings Accounts set up, set them up this week.

Once your accounts are created, go into your online banking for your main checking account and look for “recurring payments” or “automatic transfers”. You can enter your savings accounts as payees and set recurring automatic payments to each savings account!

Just be careful with the timing. We recommend scheduling it for a day or two after you get paid (long enough to have a little wiggle room if your paycheck is delayed for some reason, but short enough so you don’t have time to spend it!).

When you get a raise, go to these settings and increase the amounts. You’re already used to living without that extra income, so you won’t miss it. And you only need to have the willpower this one time to make the change instead of trying to follow through every pay period!

Take advantage of automation to foolproof your savings plan, and you’re guaranteed financial success! But you have to do this TODAY. You know how it goes if you wait…you get busy with other things and forget, and despite your best intentions, your life doesn’t improve because you missed this one crucial step.

What are you waiting for?  Get on it 🙂

Once you’ve got your savings accounts created and automated for guaranteed financial success, you’re ready to take your finances to the next level! Next up: How You Can be One of the Rich getting Richer

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Post a comment to let us know how much you are saving through automation!