A-Train Finance

Saving money is tough.  Especially in a time when people are losing their jobs, inflation is at record highs, and things like gas and food are costing more than ever.   When I first started working full time, all I had was a checking account.  My money would be deposited electronically every week and I would spend it as needed on expenses.  The only problem was that I found it very difficult to consistently save money.  I was keeping track of my cash flow but basically always ended up with about the same amount of money in my account every month.  Then I opened a savings account…

From there it was really quite simple.  At the time I was being paid every week via direct deposit, so I created a savings plan.  Using my budget, I figured out exactly how much money per week out of my check I could put directly into savings without worrying about not having enough cash that week.  From there, I setup an automatic transfer from my checking account to my savings account every week, the day after I got paid.  I started out transferring $20 dollars per week into my savings account and as I got more comfortable and saved up more money, I increased it to $30, $45, then finally $50 dollars per week.  By then time I was done paying off my debt a year later, I had about $2,000 dollars in an online savings account making 5.05% interest.

Some people might have preferred to just put all of the money towards paying off their debt, but I had a set monthly payment that I decided on that would allow me to have a cash buffer in case of any emergencies because I was set on not using any credit cards for anything.

If you would like to setup a similar savings system as I did, try out E*Trade’s Online Savings account.  It’s pretty easy to use and you can setup regular account transfers.