As a college student, I find it difficult to cook meals for myself between studying, attending meetings, volunteering and salvaging a shred of a social life. As a result, I frequently find myself spending God knows how much money on fast food, despite my best efforts to prepare my own meals. Saving money is difficult especially when you’re hungry, lazy and surrounded by greasy food joints. It’s almost like exercising; you go to the gym for three days straight, and take one day off, which then turns into two weeks. The same is true with saving money; you don’t eat out, go shopping or spend any money of any kind until the weekend rolls around, and you and your girls go out for drinks.
Many times, I have attempted to save money and failed miserably. I have tried to limit myself to $20 in spending money a month, but it always seemed inadequate. $10 went to a student organization and $10 went to a textbook; I still hadn’t eaten with that money, so I regrettably transferred another $20 from my savings account to my checking account.
The next month, I tried cutting out spending all together. That was just a poorly thought out plan; I ended up spending more money than I had when I “limited” myself to $20 a month. I later tried only spending money on the first of the month or the 15th of the month. I ended up either blowing my whole check on the first of the month or wasting money on both the first and the 15th of the month. I recently found a system that works; I transfer $20 into my savings account on the first of each month. The only issue I had was remembering to transfer the money.
Plan D of “Operation Save More” involved me setting an alert in my phone to remind me to save $20. Online banking is convenient, but the transfer still managed to slip my mind. I plan to make more of an effort to save money in hopes that Plan E proves unnecessary.