[E] A Penny Saved is A Penny Earned

NOTE: the idiom above means that we shouldn’t spend or waste money, but try to save it

let me share with you some tips given by my financial-related-work friend, Faiz regarding money saving. it is important for us to have our own saving, in case there are circumstances that might need us to use big amount of money.

• when we get our paycheck, spare and ‘hide’ a portion of our salary as our saving. to do this, we have to make our monthly budget. DO NOT USE the money.  the wrong method of doing this is “SPEND our salary and THEN KEEP the balance as saving“.
• TAX our expenses. these would make us more thoughtful in spending the cash. let say, breakfast cost us RM2.30, the balance of it is 70 cents. ‘bank in’ the balance in a coin box and tax the expenses, let say RM1. then, bank in all the taxation in the coin box in your saving account, it is safer and wiser.
• stay at home on weekends (or anywhere that don’t require us to spend money). try to do other activities that would prevent us from going shopping.
• list all the things before going to shop. we should only buy the things we need rather than buying things we want.
• key in our expenses dlm Microsoft Money.. or any other application that can view our expense graphs. from the graphs, we could review and re-budget our expenses.
• for budget, breakdown to weekly expenses instead of lump sum. do not keep a big amount of cash.
• print a picture of something that we really want, like ermm.. interesting vacation places, big house, cool car or anything and paste them on your wall (where you always can see them). this is to motivate us to save more~

it is never too early to save. or we better late then never. i am practicing these tips myself, but i always cheat on the taxation. haha… i better be more discipline!

do you have any good tips to share here? do leave a comment. i would be very happy! and thank you!