Top Saving Tips

I’m glad you enjoyed the article about having more than one savings account!

As promised, here is a recap of the 2 Top Tips I mentioned in the article, PLUS 3 additional ones to make your head spin even more 🙂

1. Account Nicknames

A lot of your goals have set deadlines, like the date a bill is due, or a specific time frame something needs to be completed by. In addition, many banks allow you to add nicknames for your savings accounts, and these nicknames can usually be pretty lengthy.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Why not include the due date for that goal/bill part of the nickname of each savings account? Here is an example of one of my savings account nicknames:

It includes the name of the bill, the amount needed and the date it’s due. This makes it very hard to forget what you set out to do.

If you have the space, go ahead and add the amount you should be saving each month towards this goal, and you’ve just set yourself up very nicely towards reaching your goals.

2. Setup Goals in Mint

Are you a Mint user? You know that section called “Goals” where you can set a goal and see how close/far you are from reaching that goal? I always had these budgets set up but they were linked to accounts that had more than one hypothetical goal attached.

Having these separate accounts makes it SUPER easy to utilize this feature to it’s full potential. Since you now have an account set up for each goal, you can link that account with the goal and accurately track how much longer it is until you reach that goal. AWESOME.

3. Recurring Goal Payments

Most people know about financial automation, but they don’t use it to the fullest extent. Are you really gung-ho about accomplishing your goals this time around? Take about 5 minutes and calculate how many paycheck you have until your goal’s deadline. Divide the amount of paychecks between now and then into the amount of money needed to save.

Example –

Goal: $5,500 to max out my Roth IRA for 2017
Deadline: April 15, 2018
Paychecks left: 27
$5,000 / 27 = $203.70 is the amount you need to save each paycheck to reach your goal

If you set up recurring payments that come from each paycheck, you have a fail-safe way to actually DO the things you set out to do. SWEET!

4. Let your bank tell you when you’ve reached your goals.

With some banks (I use Ally for savings), you can set up balance alerts that will tell you when your account falls below OR goes above a certain balance. I set up an alert with Ally to give you a visual:

So now when I reach my goal of $600 for my car insurance bill, I will get an email notification and can stop contributing money to that account for now.

Want to take it a step further? Read on.

5. Instant notifications of Goal Progress

Maybe you don’t check that email account often, or want INSTANT notification of this goal being reached.

Ever used IFTTT? It’s a super sweet automation tool that you can link up to your email service and smartphone notifications. I set up an alert that says “Okay, so if Ally alerts emails me, I want you to send me an iOS notification to my phone and let me know about it. Here’s the alert I set up:

And with all of the detail out on the open:

WOAH! I just automated the whole process. I don’t have to think about making the payments AND my phone will alert me when I hit my goal, and will tell me I’m a rockstar.

Do you have more tips that you’d like to see here? Send them on over, I’d love to hear about them!

Here are some other articles you might find helpful:

A Great Way to Keep Track of Your Bills – Ever scrambling to make sure you paid the credit card bill this month, or saved for your goals? Check out this new way to keep track of your bills.