4 Money Saving Tips for 2020

To get our FREE kit to mastering your money, go to

Link to Budget Bytes:

According to a study from Fidelity – in 2020, 67% of Americans are considering a financial resolution related to saving, investing, managing debt, budgeting and retirement planning and that number is up from 2019.

Now there are two sides to this coin – it is awesome that more people are prioritizing their personal finances, but it also reflects the reality that there are a lot of people who are in difficult financial situations.

Americans in total have over $1 trillion in credit card debt, and almost $1.5 trillion in student loan debt.

With those kinds of numbers, it’s probably not surprising to hear that in the Fidelity survey the most common money resolutions were “saving more” and paying down debt.

I’m Dylan Lewis from the Motley Fool, and in this video, we’re going to break down some of the most popular and effective approaches to saving money consistently.

The first step in understanding your finances is to build a budget – if you’ve already done that, skip ahead. But if you haven’t, here’s a quick rundown.

- Take your salary (minus taxes). You can work off your take home pay
- Jot down all the non-negotiable expenses you have in your life: things like rent or mortgage, utilities, groceries, your car bill, and healthcare costs.

Whatever you have left over is potential savings. And if the number is negative, you’re spending more than you’re making which is not sustainable.

Non-negotiable expenses are tough to work down, you need your car to get to work and you need a place to live. Things like the amount you spend on food is one of the easiest things to control, but even there, there’s a floor. There are some super helpful sites like budgetbytes.com – the site focuses on tasty-low cost meals and it breaks down a rough estimate of how much each meal costs per serving.

One of my go-to savings tips is to work to think about monthly expenses as annual costs and keep recurring expenses as low as possible. So for my housing, I make enough to live on my own, but have always lived with roommates in group houses in Washington D.C. because it is so much cheaper.

And adding to that, I’ve always lived in the cheapest room in the house. It may seem over the top, but the difference between $800 a month in rent and $1000 is $2400 over the course of the whole year, and it’s a one-time fix for my finances.

Of course you don’t only have your non-negotiable expenses. Living and doing stuff comes with costs and it’s hard to balance saving for later while enjoying the present.

There are a couple tried and true methods of budgeting that can help you hold on to more of that leftover money.

First up – the cash-only method. This one is pretty straightforward. Based on the disposable income you have left over after looking at your non-negotiable expenses, you give yourself an “allowance” for each week or month, and crucially, you hold it in cash.

What you have in your hand is yours to spend for that period of time, and when you don’t have anything left you know you’ve bumped up against your budget.

This helps a lot of people solve for the “infinite money” effect credit cards can tend to have. Building good credit history and habits is really important, but if you find yourself overspending this is a great way to rein it in and make yourself much more aware of where your money is going because you’re going to have to hand it over to someone in order to get stuff.

Next – The dollar a week formula. Humans generally tend to underestimate the effects of growth in action, there’s actually a term for this – it’s called the exponential growth bias.

The dollar a week approach is a great example of how consistently doing one thing regularly over time will create something big in the end.

The idea is that you start out saving $1 a week and every week, you save one more dollar than you did the previous week. By the end of the year you’ll be saving $52 a week and have $1378 on hand. Not bad for starting with just $1.

Like most self-help advice, there isn’t one true answer to the “best” way to budget and save, there are a ton of different ways to do it and it’s really a matter of finding what works best for you.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Subscribe to The Motley Fool's YouTube Channel:





Join our Facebook community:



Follow The Motley Fool on Twitter:

How to save money,money tips,money tricks,money saving tips,money management tips,best way to save money,how to save money on groceries,how to save money each month,how to start saving money,