Be a Financial Squirrel
When it comes to fooling yourself to save more money, think like a squirrel. Just as squirrels bury their nuts to prepare for winter, we can save money to prepare for economic droughts. And although we take money lessons from squirrels, they don’t store all their rewards in one place, which is very important.
How Saving Money Helps You Save More
The concept of a financial protein comes down to minimizing the risk of keeping all your savings in one place and maximizing the reward for creating multiple different accounts. Especially if you’re not interested in investing your money in long-term cars, it’s good to fool yourself into cutting down on the amount of savings you can see at one time.
Personally, I like to think of it as “hiding” my own savings from myself – it greatly reduces the likelihood that I will dip into them. An easy way to do this is to create an additional savings account for the sole purpose of forgetting it exists (until you absolutely need to connect to it).
Set aside your money to stay on top of your goals
The squirrel mentality is also useful for visualizing various savings goals. For example, you can start naming different accounts depending on what they are for. You can have a standard rainy day fund and a Roth IRA , but you can also have a summer trip fund, a rental reserve fund, a new car fund, and so on. It is much easier to track the progress of your savings when these funds are separated into different accounts. Here’s our guide to setting up a high-yielding savings account.
There are many reasons why you might choose to save rather than invest , one of the main ones being that you have short-term goals for your money. So if you’re mentally struggling to set aside your savings, consider “hiding” it from yourself in a few places, such as a squirrel and its precious nuts.