Monday, January 12, 2009

Have Patience When Building Your Savings


Tip #52 - Have Patience When Building Your Savings. Building up your savings takes time. A lot of time. It doesn't happen overnight. It's unrealistic to think you will win the lottery, get a windfall from a long-lost relative, or hit triple 7s in the casino. Those things happen to very few people. The rest of us need to build up our savings slowly in order to have a significant amount of money.

Twenty-five thousand dollars sounds like a lot of money. It is! If you won $25,000 in the lottery, you would be ecstatic. Well, don't count on that, but you can save $25,000 pretty easily. Put away $200 per month and in about 10 years you, too, will have $25,000! Ten years sounds like a long time, but remember the idea is to save a little bit everyday. And that little bit will add up to a lot in a few years' time.
Many people fall into the trap of thinking that they will never have a lot of money unless they win it. I hear, "If I win the lottery" so many times, I could scream. Anybody can accumulate money. Just save a little bit everyday. Put it away each month, and your savings will add up to a large sum. It just takes time and patience. It sounds basic, but it works.

In Real Life (IRL) - I started saving money when I was 22 - fresh out of college. Each month I put a little away because I lived on less than I earned. I remember making spreadsheets about how long it would take me to attain a certain amount. I had goals for when I would reach $100,000, $500,000, and even one million dollars! And while it seemed far off in the future that these events would happen, time went very fast, as it often seems to.

I am 41 years old now, so it's been almost 20 years since I started saving money month after month. Thank goodness for those early saving days. I haven't reached a million dollars yet, but, we are getting closer. We still put money away each month - especially for retirement. It goes off into the savings accounts and I don't even think about it. But it's there.

We hope to retire in about 20 years, and I'm sure that time will seem to go even faster than the last 20 did. But by putting away some money each month, I can be assured that I will have a large amount of money when I retire. Because I am building my savings slowly - one month at a time. It's the only way to do it.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

How to get self-discipline and patience?

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