Summer time. A lovely time of hot weather, beaches, vacations to paradise, nights out on the strip, and shopping in town while it’s still light out at 9pm. Oh yeah, it’s also a time that we human beings tend to overspend. Yep, the monthly budgets of June, July and August seem to get thrown out the window and ran over by a garbage truck for many of us. Reminds me of that scene from the great movie Mrs. Doubtfire where the late Robin Williams (God, I’m going to miss him) throws his mask out the window and watches it get run over by a huge garbage truck. Yes, that is what we tend to do with saving money during the summer. But summer is over now. Officially. Save your BOOHOO’s because fall is a fantastic time of year too. Football, Pumpkin Spice Lattes (and everything pumpkin for that matter, especially UFO pumpkin beer). That is exactly why you should use the fall to fall back into saving. Here is the best way to recover from a summer of overspending and why you should fall back into savings.
Just start somewhere. First of all, take that money out of your checking account and put it into a savings account rendering it less accessible to you and your swipe-happy ways. Sign up for Mint.com and set up budgets for things like clothes, eating out, bars, Apple store, Starbucks. Mint will tell you when you’re in the red in each of your spending categories. The great thing about Mint too is you can link it to every single bank account, credit account, investment account etc. So you have a nice little dashboard of everything in the world of your personal finances. They have a very nice app that you can download straight to your iPhone 6 Plus or iPad. They present your finances with pretty graphs and provide analytics and metrics. It’s really cool. Start saving again and start saving now because you know whats right around the corner, don’t you? Can you guess? THE HOLIDAYS!! That’s right. Santa Clause is coming to town in T-Minus 85 Days! Another time of year that we human beings love to overspend. So let’s earmark some money to account for that overspending now. This way we don’t run up our credit cards and take out another mortgage on our houses.
Did you know if you go to Starbucks everyday and get one grande fancy drink like a PSL or a peppermint Mocha that amounts to $1879.75 a year. What am I getting at? Cut down on those kinds of expenses and watch the savings pile up like the leaves your going to have to rake soon. So FALL back into savings folks.
