Military Saves Week: Day 2, Saving Automatically!
by johnnyc2id on Feb 26, 2019
February 25 to March 2nd is Military Saves Week, designed to help promote personal saving and reducing debt. Each day of the week will have a special focus and today’s focus is Saving Automatically!
Click here for Day 1’s Blog, Save With a Plan!
When we reduce the obstacles, distractions and myriad of ways that money can get “lost” between our paycheck and getting into a savings account, we can make it far more likely that we can save with a purpose and save successfully; this can happen if you save automatically. There are a couple of ways you can do this:
- Through My Pay, or by contacting your company’s payroll department, you can set up a monthly allotment to split your actual paycheck, so that while a portion goes to your checking, a separate portion can also go directly to a designated savings account.
- If your company doesn’t support splitting your paycheck, no worries. Instead, work directly with your bank to have an automatic amount transfer every month from your checking account to a savings account.
By having the deposits go directly to your savings account, or transfer automatically, you are essentially making savings a regular part of your monthly “expenses.” An expense though, that is not paying someone else, but paying yourself! This is saving automatically. By eliminating the need to have to manually move money from one account to another, you take away the chance that you may spend that money on something else before you get around to depositing it into savings.
The second key is making sure you have clearly defined why you are saving, i.e. what is it you are saving for? By having the savings account linked to your financial goals, it can make the saving more meaningful and beneficial for you in the long run.
If you find yourself wondering why you don’t have money at the end of the month to put into savings, saving automatically may be for you. Try it with a small amount at first, and try to increase it as your financial situation allows.
Check out the Military Saves page for a ton of additional resources and links!
