Bryan C. Fleming

If you’re worrying about money it’s because you don’t feel you have enough. Every fortune begins with only a few dollars and grows from there. That’s why it’s so important to learn to save money. It’s a habit you must learn to develop.

You might feel like you can’t save money because you don’t have enough. This is because you’re a victim of today’s advertising. Advertisers have gotten very good at making you feel like you need things that you simply don’t need. We’re bombarded by advertisements from morning to night. It’s no wonder we’ve all bought a bunch of things we don’t really need.

Throw credit card companies into the mix and you’ve got a cocktail for financial hardships. Easy credit and fancy advertising can lead anyone into a pit of credit card debt that can be very hard to get out from. So how do you save money when you don’t have enough?

In that question is the answer. You see you really do have enough money. What you’re doing is paying your bills and spending the rest on things you think you need. People rarely have a money-making problem, they almost always have a money-spending problem. You must understand this. You already make enough money. You only have to play a better defense and learn to spend less. Why? Because until you discipline yourself to control your spending you’ll continue to have money problems—No matter how much money you make.

Learning to save money is actually pretty easy. You should set up an automatic system to save money before you get a chance to spend it. Trying to save it afterwards rarely works. The saying “Pay yourself First” is famous for a reason. Life seems to have a way of taking it before we can sock it away. If you’ve never saved money before do this:

Take 10 cents for every dollar you earn and get it out of our bank account immediately. It doesn’t matter how many bills or creditors you have screaming to be paid. Just get 10% out of your bank account. Pay yourself first. Pay yourself before anyone else gets paid. That’s how you save money. You’ll naturally adjust to the new spending level and everything will take care of itself.

So what do you do with the money if it’s not in your bank account? Well, for the first couple months I’d strongly suggest you keep the cold hard cash somewhere safe. Somewhere where you can see it regularly and here’s why:

Seeing a pile of money is so much more powerful than seeing a number on bank statement. A giant stack of 20’s or 100’s really drives home what you’re doing.

I started doing this a few years ago. I can vividly remember how quickly, I had a pile of money. By saving 10% of my $60,000 per year salary, I quickly had almost $500. Then a short while later it was $2,000. There’s something powerful about sitting on the couch counting out $2,000 in cold hard cash. No matter what financial problems I was having, I felt like I had a lot of money. Eventually that money made its way into a bank account and gets some interest now, but if you really want to save money you need to see the cash!

So let’s save 10 cents for every dollar we earn. Let’s pay ourselves first, and let’s do it in a way where we can see the cold hard cash.

“If you want something done, ask someone who’s already busy”. That’s a popular saying and it’s true. Lazy people are all around us. They’ve been around since the beginning of time. Trying to work with these people will not only frustrate you, it will zap your energy.

Ask a diligent person to do something and you’ll find it will be done. Ask a lazy person to do the same thing and you’ll get something too. What will you get?

An Excuse!

That’s right. A lazy person will never tell you they are lazy. They’ll give you a reason why they couldn’t do it. You’ll find they do this with everything. Ask them why they don’t have a job? They’ll have an excuse ready for you. Ask them why they didn’t uphold their commitment to a dinner party? You’ll get yet another excuse.

We all run into unforeseen circumstances. Times when we can’t uphold our commitments. You can’t hold that against anyone. It’s in the excuse itself where you can find the lazy person. Are their excuses outlandish? Do they make sense? Would you use the same excuse? This is how you find the lazy person.

We need to understand that people who are always making excuses. People who never seem to get anything done are in fact people that will only slow you down. You will simply waste too much time and too much energy trying to get them to do anything. It’s much better to find someone else to simply do it. By working with diligent people. People, who won’t make an excuse, will save you a lot time and wasted effort.