According to http://elenatahora.com, a lifestyle mummy blog, saving and investment habits are fully dependent on one’s lifestyle. In order to improve a personal saving and investment habit, there is the need for self-discipline, setting of targets and ensuring that they are achieved. There are many ways to improve self-savings habit, and they are described below:
Keep better records of your expenses
In order to be a successful saver and investor, records of expenses need to be timely, orderly and accurate. These will help one track their savings journey, and know if they are making positive or negative steps. Recording expenses make sure that one can account for any shilling spent, and make a decision on what can be left out of the future expenses.
Have a budget
On a personal level, one can have different budgets such as monthly and yearly budgets. These are helpful since one is able to keep check their spending. In budgeting, one sets aside a certain amount of income for expenditure, and the target is to not exceed that in the given timeframe. This eliminates such behavior as impulse shopping, which is a great hindrance to saving and investing.
Set a target
Having your eye on some item you want to purchase motivates one into saving. An example can be planning to buy a car in a year, which costs around $5000 and one can purpose to save a minimum of $500 per month over a duration of 10 months. This makes it easy since the target pushes one into ensuring that they set aside that money on each end month.
Avoid unnecessary use of credit cards
If possible, to achieve a successful savings target, it is most advisable to completely avoid the use of credit cards, and only restrict it to emergency situations. For good savings and investments, you should have the mentality of living inside your means, thereby always buy things on cash, while still watching the budget set forward.
Closely monitor your savings path
In order to know the success rate of your savings progress, there is need to make the track of each saving event. With a pattern, one is able to track the progress and is able to make amendments where they have a shortfall. This monitoring can be done in the form of records in a file, to compare at the end of a financial duration with the targeted goal.
Avoid impulse buying
Impulse buying greatly dents a savings plan and can be considered the biggest enemy to savings and investments. Elena Tahora of http://elenatahora.com advises on making payments for only the things you need, and those that are on a budget or shopping list. Impulse shopping includes cheap things, such as roadside ware, but these accumulate with time and become a huge expenditure.
Negotiate the bills
Most service providers allow a slight negotiation, which should be taken advantage of since the target of savings is spending the least amounts of money.
Always keep in mind that even though you may be earning a lot of money, you still need to make sure that you save up as much as you can so that you can better prepare yourself for the future especially during emergency situations when having extra funds will come in handy.
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