Let’s be honest with ourselves. How many times have we said that we are going to eat healthier and it didn’t last? I personally will start out with good intentions until a holiday or a birth day party with comes up. The resolve then goes out the window along with my diet. It takes a lot a discipline to maintain a healthy live style and a healthy balance sheet. Sometimes it is best to make the decision to automate your financial health and then you don’t even have to think about it. Now if we could only automate our diet….
One of the ways that I have found to do save automatically is through an online bank account — ingdiret.com. It is not the only solution to automatically putting a predetermined amount into savings. You might be able to set something up with your bank or credit union where a predetermined amount goes from one account to a separate one for savings. I like to keep my savings account separate from the account that I use for my regular expenses. That way the temptation and ease of spending savings is greatly reduced. But really it doesn’t matter how you automate, just don’t pay for the service. There are plenty of free solutions out there. You just need to find a way to “pay yourself first”.
Even if you have acquired a large amount of debt you need to get in the habit of saving. If you only pay off your debt but never build up a buffer, the next time you have an emergency you will have to go right back into debt. The cycle will start again and you really haven’t fix you debt problem, you just slapped a band-aid on it.
There is a great book that I would recommend on saving automatically. If you read this you will see how powerful an automated savings setup can be.
Here is the link for ING: