What’s one thing you wish you had started doing earlier in life?

I know it’s not great to look back into your life and wish you could’ve done things differently. It just makes you frustrated. But I’ll think of it as things to teach my kids so that they start out better.

But saving. I wish I had started saving money earlier. I started working when I was thirteen. It wasn’t a crazy amount of money, but I never had savings. If I had started at that time, saving half and spending half I would have been better off. Because let’s be honest a kid wants to spend money. This money was my fun money. If I wanted to go see a movie, buy a movie, buy extra clothes, etc. Self explanatory; anything extra.

Thinking back, it wasn’t a huge amount of money back then. I only worked Wednesday and Friday. But still.

When I was eighteen/nineteen I also didn’t save. All my money went to food, clothes, or dvds. Instead of bringing a lunch I would buy lunch at school. I was constantly eating out on my off days. Almost every Friday I was going shopping for clothes. I didn’t have a life. I did school, swam, and shopped. But again I never had savings.

I think it was halfway through my nineteenth year that my mom suggested I start saving. Starting late is better than never starting. I wished I had saved more. Because the action of saving, kickstarted my need and desire to save. Maybe just having savings.

Because these last few years we haven’t been able to save. We’ve made some bad purchases. $500 there, $1k here. Not huge amounts of money, but still we could have just saved it instead.

So I’ve started a new saving way. Each week we take out $20 and I’m hiding it away. I only started this five weeks ago. But my thought process is we will have a large amount of money by Christmas time. So it won’t be a sudden “ouch”. It will be an “okay, this is not too bad”. Because we have a birthday before Christmas, Christmas, and a birthday after Christmas. So December is an expensive month. So if we have $340 dollars set aside it won’t be so difficult to buy gifts.

Just an easy way to save. If you do the $20 for 52 weeks that’s $1040. So by Christmas time we would have a large chunk ready. depending on your paychecks you can decide to set aside more. But at least do $20. Like if you start out doing $50. And then in June you want to go on a trip, switch to $20 a week. Then September comes and you can save more, you set aside $50 again. And then when it becomes November you discover a perfect gift so you set aside $75 a week until December’s third week. That is =$2300 roughly. Having $2300 set aside already makes all holiday expenses easier.

Sorry. Didn’t mean to rant. Just I feel better when I have savings.

So save. No matter the age. Whether you are an adult or teenager. Save! And you can do it in a bank account instead. Make a savings account that you don’t look at, just start setting aside money each week. Even if all you can save is $15. It’s still something. Something is more than nothing.

Have a Fun Friday!!