If you’ve recently been paid, make it your goal to open an online savings account at one of the following if you haven’t done so:
- HSBC Direct or
- Emigrant Direct or
- …the online saving account of your choice.
There are many online savings account but the purpose of this article is to get going instead of doing nothing or get stuck in analysis paralysis.
The two online savings accounts I suggest are popular, easy to use, and besides, I use them and my daughter does too. But again, the disclaimer monster makes me say, “That’s the way I save, I’m not telling you, that you have to save the same way I do.”
This is also the first action of the three actions I talk about to make your saving and investing life easy and automatic. A lot of folks have written about this automatic stuff but I guess the person who made the biggest splash with automatic savings is David Bach and his The Automatic Millionaire, A Powerful One-Step Plan To Live And Finish Rich.
What you’re going for here is the automatic part of saving for your “Rainy Day” funds. I don’t separate rainy day funds and emergency funds because a lot of people can’t afford to separate to that degree.
The Top Ten Reasons To Start Saving Money:
- You’ve lost your job and you need some funds available to carry yourself or your family for a period of time.
- You need a $1,100.00 brake job. And no, you don’t know any good mechanics who will do it tomorrow and have it done by the end of the day.
- You’re dog needs an arthritic joint removed in her hind leg.
- You’re family member needs some emergency money and you decide to help them out.
- You’re Sump Pump stopped working during the largest rain storm you’ve ever seen and you’re not home when it happened.
- You built a Pergola over your deck. You went out of town for three days and no one was watching your house. You come back and discover the support boards for the Pergola that you built were not screwed into the joists that you thought were there and now the who thing has crashed through your sliding glass doors.
- You live at the end of a T street. At the top of the T, a car careens down the shaft of the T with no one in it. It barrels up your driveway (at the top of the T) and smashes through your garage door. Well, hopefully insurance would cover this.
- You’re in a car, careening down a street about 25 miles per hour and you think you lost your brakes. So Fred Flinstone images come to mind. You decide to open the door and stick your foot out and use it to act like a brake. Actually your brakes didn’t go out. You’re car stalled making the brakes harder than heck to depress.
- You just went through a tough winter with tons of snow and when the snow melted, water stains are showing up on your ceiling.
- Your house went through some major wind storms recently and you lost quite a few shingles. You want to upgrade to better shingles for the whole roof. Insurance might cover part of it but not all of it.
When you’ve setup an online savings account and you’ve connected it to your bank account and you’ve setup the amount you want automagically transferred each month, every two weeks or whatever your time preference is, you can sit back and watch the confirmation emails come in when the transfers happen.
Make adjustments to it if you need or want to. Add more automatically or even decrease the amount you automatically transfer because it has grown so much over time.
That’s what it looks like when you’ve set up an automatic transfer to your online saving account from, let’s say a checking account.
Here’s something to ponder, some folks need a prize when they purchase stuff. You buy a new book and lay down your hard earned cash. You get something physical in return. It looks good. It feels good. It smells new and fresh!!
With an online savings account you don’t get anything physical in return…yet. You just send money to it and it grows but you don’t get anything physical in return like a new dress or the daily coffee you buy for $2, $3, $4 bucks a day. Gee, that sounds like extra savings money to me.
Look at any repetitive thing you buy on a daily or every other day basis and just stop it. Send that money away to your online savings account. You will not miss it and whatever your habit is, it might even make you healthier person.