Plan to save more? Here's how to get started🤨

In today's day and age, spending has become simpler and everything can be done with just one click on our phone. Making purchases seems to be an unconscious course of action and savings become something that doesn't come to our mind at the beginning of each month. We almost forgot why we are even spending our time at work, working so hard for that paycheck. And at the end of the day, we forget to pay ourselves first! Instead, we rush off paying the big companies making purchases that we might not actually need. Is it too late to start now ?

Yes we might give ourselves the promise of paying ourselves first and start being disciplined enough to control our next purchases but....

before we know it, we have the 9.9 sales that moved into the Black Friday sale and cyber Monday comes around the corner not too long later. We lose track of our finances only to realise that we are chasing the crowd, and the sales that we see.

Now, there is no need to deprive yourself of every purchase out there, everyone deserves the right to pamper themselves a little especially with our hard earned money! But just bear in mind whenever a purchase is made, make it an intentional one! We should take responsibility for where our money goes and make the conscious decision at the start of each month.

We know it can be really tough to face the reality when we open up our bank account only to realise that most of our money has disappeared from our account and all we could do was to wait for the next paycheck to come in.

It definitely never feel good to be at that situation and how we wish we could turn back in time to the beginning of the month and get things into perspective right. But fret not, if this is similar to what you’re facing now, hang tight as we have some tips for you!

Tip 1: Remove your Debit card, credit card, bank account information on any e-commerce platforms

We know data is the most powerful tool that companies have, but we fail to realise we have actually given them control of our spending habits just by providing them with one little bit of data - Our debit and credit card information !

"Ohh how convenient it is to just make a purchase and wait for it's delivery with just one click ?" That might be the reason why we are overspending huh.

Ever receive a notification that goes like "Save your payment details?" More often than not, we lean towards clicking the 'Yes' button due to the convenience but we never realised how dangerous that can be to our wallets.

Just imagine one day you are sitting in a cafe reading a book by the cozy corner and you see someone walking in with bright red headphones. The colour caught your attention and you looked at the headphones that you are Currently using. “MaybeI should get a new headphones for myself."

You went onto Shopee, saw a headphone that you like and immediately clicked the 'Buy Now' button. Boom! Item is on it's way and totally fuss free. All of these happened within minutes and you didn't even need to pause and think for a second about that purchase.

If you find yourself falling for this trap most of the time, you can simply adopt the habit of manually typing in your billing information and card information prior to making a purchase. This allows us to make informed purchases and avoid making any impulse purchases with just one click buy.

I know what some of you might be thinking.. is it too much of a trouble to re enter those 16 digit numbers and going through all the verification procedure all over again ? Then maybe the 48 hours rule might help you !

Ever heard about the 48 hours rule ?

Huh what 48hours some of you might ask.

it is simply to just save all your items to the cart first and to give yourself 48 hours before coming back to the cart to make the purchase. The reason for doing so is to avoid any impulse purchases. The 48 hours will allow you to make more conscious purchases.

As simple as just removing our credit card details might just be the recipe to make more informed purchases thus reducing our impulse purchases, go give it a try !

Tip 2 : Stashing away predetermined allocation of allowance/ salary money to another saving account/ imaginary acc; allocating in your mind not to touch it!

Next, ever heard about the saying "out of sight, out of mind ?" Why not allocate the money that comes in at the beginning of each month to a place that is out of sight first ? This will allow us to be disciplined and make the habit of saving.

One of the ways that you can adopt is by setting up a high interest rate savings account and to allocate your set amount of savings every month into that account. That account shall not be touched unless really necessary and I would also recommend putting away any debit cards that came along with it.

With the set portion of our allowance / pay that comes in put into a place where it is out of sight, it would have created a positive habit of disciplined saving each month and reduce the chances of you tapping into these savings unnecessarily.

Now, if you are a minimalist who keeps all your money in one account, it is totally alright and you do not need to rush off opening another bank account just for this purpose. Instead, you can start with keeping track of your spendings via a spending tracker that you can download for free from the App Store or Google play Store. Alternatively, you can also create an excel sheet that allows you to keep track of your spendings.

Depending on which method you prefer and adopt, they both bring upon a common point of paying yourself first. Pay yourself first by saving and investing before you start paying others by spending it.

Tip 3: Is social media becoming a barrier between you and your savings account? (Be aware of that you see online)

In today's digital age, digital marketing has become a popular means of pushing up companies' sales and profitability, it has become a common sight for influencers and media companies to take up sponsorships to push a product to audiences like us that are glued onto our screens. Whether or not the product is applicable to us. With the influx of content that we are exposed to everyday, we don't realise it but maybe influenced by what we see from our screens.

We see that shiny new iPhone in well edited and filtered photos on instagram and we dream about owning them. Then we looked at our one year old phone and told ourselves how outdated it has become. When in fact it still functions perfectly well. We fall into that trap of spending.

Slowly, we start buying upon the idea of chasing the trend, chasing the latest and the greatest that are available. We forgot the purpose of making purchases simply when we really needed to, and we ended up questioning ourselves "Where did our money go?"

Maybe this is you, and you hope to make a change to that. Like how the first step to going on a healthy diet is to remove all the junk food and snacks from our sight, it goes the same here. Since social media is the driving factor that makes our purchases unnecessary, it might be time to consider who we actually want to follow and the types of content that we see on our screens everyday.

We are not here to advocate the idea of staying disconnected from the world and your friends, but more on the idea of being conscious and to the types of media that we consume and how it can actually affect our spending habits.

Saving Tips So here you go, here are 3 tips for you that you can start implementing now to help you save this month. If you find it hard to implement all 3 tips right at once, maybe consider just adopting one of the 3 tips first and slowly implement the rest in the future !