Who doesn’t like to save money? Even if you get your first job after college, you could save money by maintaining a decent lifestyle. Evenings filled with parties and shopping in the morning are not the ideal lifestyle for people who like to save money.
Saved money can be used for investments or emergencies, depending on your requirements. Also, you can start your own business if you have enough money saved. Not all business requires immense micro-managing and planning like franchises. For instance, you can start a smoothie bar franchise since healthy eating is all the rage these days.
As a fresher, you can begin by analyzing what’s causing you to spend money. Tracking expenditure is crucial. Then, you know how much you can save. Let’s understand what’s going on in your life, preventing you from saving money.
Why can’t you save money? — Three Golden Rules
Your lifestyle choices are in your control. If you’re left with no dollars at the end of each month, this means you’re making wrong choices. The first step to saving is cutting down on unnecessary expenditure, and here you’ll analyze what’s leading to that expenditure with three golden rules.
The Friendship Test
As a young person, where do you spend the most money? You may have friends who like to spend their time in fancy places with big bills. It can be exotic hotels or spa treatments. Now, it’s certain you’d like to save some money; that’s why you’re reading this right now. Therefore, you must put your friendship to the test.
Tell your friends about your goals. You can say that you want to save $15,000 by the end of this year. That’s why you can’t spend on fancy places like these. Explain to them what you’d like to do with your money — invest it. If they’re good friends, they’ll understand. If they don’t and it gets awkward, you know that this friendship is not worth it
If you quit the extravagance that you can’t afford, you’ll be able to save enough to invest in your future. And, you can show them your Demat account, later on, so they can grind their teeth.
The Binge Shopping Test
There’s a routine that is very common among freshers — whenever they feel sad, they go out shopping, and they feel happy after that. This is understandable. When you shop, your brain releases dopamine a chemical that’s responsible for the feeling of pleasure. Due to this, you’ve almost made it a habit to get dressed and go for a shopping ‘experience’ to cheer you up.
What’s happening here is there’s a trigger — which is sadness — that’s pushing you towards a routine. This routine of shopping whenever you feel sad is costing you money. You do that repeatedly because this leads to a reward of feeling satisfied and happy. Here’s what you can do to put a stop to it.
Let the trigger and reward be the same, but change the routine. Find other things that make you happy and choose them over shopping. These activities can be playing a sport, going for a long drive, dancing, or reading a book. You’ll build a new routine in no time.
Cost per use Test
There are things in life that we buy to use only once or twice. They can be an expensive camera that you bought for that one trip or a beautiful fur coat that requires a very specific occasion and place you wear. Now, these can’t be used daily. You can’t wear that coat to your office because it’s too fancy and you can’t carry your camera everywhere since you have an iPhone.
What you can do is calculate the cost per use of that coat. A good quality fur coat is priced at $600, which you wore only two times. This means you’ve spent $300 per use. Isn’t that a bit much? And there’s nothing wrong with buying this stuff if you have money, but if you’re fresher, who needs to pay for rent, gas, and livelihood, this per-use coat is over the roof.
There’s so much that you can do with the saved money. Then why can’t people save it? The answer is obvious for college students or freshers — they don’t earn that much that they can save. But it’s all a matter of choice. That fancy bag or Xbox 5 came from the money you chose to spend rather than saving it.
People save money, not when they have plenty of it. Rich people go broke all the time because of their spendthrift nature. You save money when you prioritize saving money.