Do you think this would help someone save more money? For example the strategies you use to save money for an emergency fund should be different from say the strategies you use to save money for retirement. With the latter you could automate the savings. Do you use different saving strategies for your saving goals? If you do, do you think it's better than using just one saving strategy?
I save in different ways for different occasions. For example, I save for a big Christmas food shop using loyalty point vouchers, so that I don't have to use my actual cash on the food at Christmas, thus saving me money. I make a point of not using those loyalty points until Christmas. I wouldn't do that to save for retirement though because they'd expire before I reach retirement, and they wouldn't help me with every day living like paying for rent for example.Similarly, I wouldn't want to save too far in advance or automate the payments if it was just for something like a new set of curtains for my living room. For that, I'd probably save coins in a jar or something similar until I had whatever they cost. I think different saving strategies makes sense and allows you to control what you're saving better depending on the circumstance in my opinion.
That's a good idea. I actually just save money and think of it as an all-in-one. I never really thought that I have to have different saving accounts for different purposes. It makes sense though, a savings account for retirement, then for emergency purposes and then for my son's education. This can actually work the best since I don't have to divide just one savings for all three purposes. But for this to work, I'd need to have more sources of income as well. I like what @cocolgooh does. I am a member as well of different loyalty sites so that can work for me too. I think I'll save the money from my survey sites for the retirement account, at the end of the year. Then, for my main job online, I'd save the money for expenses and emergencies. And lastly, for my freelance jobs, then I'd save that money for my son's education. So thank you for this thread! It has really been an eye-opener for me.
Nope. I disagree, same saving strategies for different saving goals. If one worked just fine, is not crazy to apply the same strategy to achieve another goal. Saving money for a plasma is not much different than hoarding money for your retirement, the only difference is quantitative though.
Not necessarily. Most people don't actively try to save money for retirement. They automate the savings. Now for other savings they could have different saving strategies for different goals. If you wanted to buy something cheap next week for example, your saving strategies could be different. Maybe you'll want to spend less money on entertainment, eat more veggies this week, etc, so you can save the money you need to buy what you need next week. Same strategy can't be applied for long term saving goals because there's a high probability that your enthusiasm to save will flag after a few weeks.
To me it's just a matter of what time frame we're talking about, I have years to collect returns on what I invest for my retirement, and one missed month isn't the end of the world so in some ways I need to be more aggressive in maintaining and growing an emergency fund. In the end though a dollar saved is a dollar saved, the difference is if my saved dollars are going to work for me in the mean time.
For me it does work and I do try and save this way in that I try to change up the methods so I could more be aware of what I am saving for when I break up my budget. Most of the time I just categorize between short term and long term savings to make it simpler and easier but sometimes I'll have to get into specifics if there's too many categories that I'm setting aside money for. Recently though I've been favoring just taking it slow and making the plans as simple as I can and only focusing on a few items at a time.
For me, saving is the same in concept, so its just means that you are basically allotting money to be used for a rainy day. So I would rather just use one strategy in all of my saving endeavors so that it won't be confusing.
