Everyone understands how important it is to save money, but it’s much easier said than done. In ideal circumstances you can just set aside some of your monthly profits and leave things there, but what if you can’t rely on a healthy profit margin every month and boost your savings account?
Plenty of people can’t. They have to struggle to make ends meet, particularly now that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a lot of damage in the world of business and left people stuck at home.
How to Boost Your Savings Account
In this post, we’re going to look at some tips that can help you save and boost your savings whenever possible. It may be difficult and require short-term sacrifice, but the more you can build up your savings account, the safer you’ll be in the long run.
Cut back on your resource use
We don’t always put much thought into the resources we use: we just account for them when we need to and assume that they’re necessary, even though they can be brought down. Take electricity, for instance. By turning off your lights when you’re not using them, shutting off your computer instead of leaving it running, and generally being sensible, you can get to the end of the month with a lower bill.
It’s even true of things like fuel. You might not be using much at the moment due to the lockdown, but plenty of people will go back to driving regularly when it’s over, and it’s important to keep fuel use down. Fuel cards (iCompario has the details) don’t just make it easier to pay for fuel and track its use: they also offer reduced rates at many providers.
Track your small-scale spending
You pay for breakfast, grab a snack, pay for lunch, catch a movie, pay for dinner… minor spending is mostly food and entertainment, and it’s something that we don’t really like to think about because these things are comforting. Even so, cutting back on your small-scale spending can really make a big difference over time.
Instead of buying a sub for lunch, get the ingredients and make one. It’ll end up considerably cheaper, and you might even enjoy it since cookery is pretty fun for most people. At the end of the year, you might notice that you’ve been able to save a lot more than you expected to, all due to those savings that seemed trivial at the time.
Use an automatic savings app
The best way to save is to make it unavoidable so you don’t need to remember to do it, and that’s entirely possible these days due to convenient financial apps. Moneybox, for instance, rounds up every payment made and puts the extra amount into an investment portfolio of sorts. You’ve probably seen something similar done for charity payments in stores.
If you set up such an app, then you can completely let it slip your mind until you eventually check your savings and discover that you’ve saved quite a bit without really noticing any difference. And if the investments do really well, you’ll come out significantly ahead.
Plan ahead to buy in bulk
Instead of picking up single items when you need them, you can do a lot for your finances by planning ahead and buying what you’re going to need in bulk. The more you buy at a given time, the more you’ll be able to save. I suggest signing up with a wholesaler so you can take full advantage of their rates.
You can’t do this for everything, obviously, but you know you’ll need various staple items, so stock up ahead of time. It’s tough to manage at the moment with people panic-buying due to the pandemic, but it’s definitely something to consider when things start to return to normal.