Teens Meet Outreach

By the time you are reading this, you are most likely thinking of how to plan for February or the next month and see how you can make it a better period financially. Guess what? It is not too late and the desire you have can be fulfilled. This article is going to highlight tips that can encourage a good saving habit and make saving as less rigorous as it can be, while saving us from the long low-cash period of January that most of us went through following the festive period.

1. Spend Less Than You Earn

This is the first essential tip for saving. A lot of individuals complain about their inability to save which usually stems from an over-budgeted life. The standard of living in the country is quite high and not relatively favorable, so a lot of people find themselves edged in a corner where they spend more than they earn and often borrow more to cover up.

If you are such an individual and already weighing the impossibility of the “Spend less than you earn” statement, then let me break it to you:

YOUR NEEDS WILL ALWAYS EXPAND TO THE QUANTITY OF RESOURCES YOU HAVE, AND THE ONES YOU DO NOT HAVE, AS IN THIS CASE.

Viewing Life from the mindset of “Never Enough”, always makes it so. The truth is, for most of us, the climax of our earning power has not yet been explored, yet we are blindfolded and wrongly focused to spend all the little that we have, when we could be earning more!

{Read: Ways High Schoolers Can Start Managing Their Money}

2. Be Willing to Save

To make the first tip a reality, we need to bring our superpowers to the table, which is naturally in us. It calls for a willingness and consciousness to save a part of our earning even before we spend any part of it for other purposes at all. This part we are saving would be a part we have personally reasoned to be good enough to save continuously and consistently, as this is what makes it all worth it.

There are various options for saving, which definitely excludes our purse, bag, cloth or any another location easily accessible to human withdrawal. The proper way to save is with restriction on withdrawal and this is available on bank options other than the regular bank saving accounts. Do well to ask your local bank representatives and also make comparison between banks for saving options that do not come with an ATM card, code or USSD transfer.

New online banking platforms like Cowrywise and PiggyVest are also amazing, trustworthy and interactive options for saving; automated saving options are also available.

{Read: Personal Finance Apps for Teens}

Now, if you are a school pupil and a daily earner, you should and can also save too. For this group, develop the habit of saving at least 10% of your daily earnings in a physical safe as shown in the images below.

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You can also save on the above mentioned platforms; banks, Cowrywise, Piggybank, etc periodically. 10% of #100 daily is #10 daily and #70 weekly, 10% of #1000 daily is #100 daily and #700 weekly and amazingly, 10% of #0 is #0, so make the difference.

3. Do More

I have superpowers and can read your minds, so I can tell you are thinking “What if the left percentage is not enough to meet our needs after saving?” Guess what? That was the plan! That it would never be enough and that that would lead to a push from the inside to do more for yourself financially and think of how you can earn more.

Note that I didn’t mention money doubling or “get-rich-quick” scheme. There are basically things that each of us can do within our capacity that will come across to others as offering value, which we can in turn request money for in exchange.

Things as basic as buying and selling, doing for people what they feel lazy to do for themselves like delivery service. We could also offer our inner talents such as writing, singing, helping others academically, and the list goes on and on. The truth is we need some pushing off limit, in order to create new limits or no limits at all. And before we know it, we have a stream of wealth that we can always develop.

No matter the profession we go into, money remains a commodity we need and take it or leave it, we all are business men and women in some ways, as we are always offering something in exchange for the other.

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So, a last quick one. Some people complain about forgetting to save until the money is almost all gone. How can we address this, if truly we want to save?

Technology is our best friend here; calendar apps and reminder settings would accompany you down this line. And for automated saving plans mentioned earlier, trust me, you don’t even need to remember. The ball is in our court, we can choose what direction to play it.

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From yours truly,
Twright (Oladimeji Tolulope Ruth)
I would keep saving my thoughts, till you save!

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