How to save your first one thousand dollars is not something you usually learn overnight.
This statement applies for myself as well.
When I started working during and after college, the scant money I made from working part-time-jobs went to cover living expenses—gas, food, car payments; the usual suspects. One you added a full-time job and rent into the mix, it was no easy feat.
Some part of the car ended up needing repaired.
Groceries seemed to get more expensive as the years went by.
An innocent lunch at restaurants would cost $10-$15 if I wasn’t paying attention.
Where was this prosperity that had been foretold after I graduated college? (Spoiler alert, it wasn’t in the degree).
Talking to some of my friends and co-workers, a lot of them expressed similar frustrations—even ones that were making more than I was. ‘Once you get a wife and kids into the mix, the expenses start racking up,’ one of them said. ‘Try and either save up a bunch of money or wait until you can get a promotion before you have kids. Trust me.’
As of right now, I’m still trusting him.
And it’s still hard.
Even if you try and move money over into a savings account, unforeseen problems arise. Kids can still arrive even if you didn’t plan on having them. Family members get sick. Cars fall apart. Emergency expenses stalk the land. Ever notice how they tend to pop up exactly when you don’t need them to? They work together and travel in packs.
Even if you earn a high-income early in life, living in a high-cost-of-living-city can nullify the excitement. Making close to—or over—$100,000 (USD) straight out of college? Awesome. Making the same amount but living in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, London, Sydney, Singapore, or New Expensiveland? Less awesome. Higher rents, gas prices, grocery prices, student-loans, and income taxes can take the wind out of the money-sails.
But there are a few steps we can take to learn how to save your first one thousand dollars.
Little by little, bit by bit, there are several things we can do to start to chip away towards an emergency-savings-benchmark.
Let’s get started.
1. Plan Your Mindset and Course of Action.
At first glance, this almost seems rudimentary. Why in the world would you not plan out how you were going to start saving up to obtain your first $1000? On what planet or plane of existence does that make sense?
Short answer: It doesn’t.
Long answer: No really, it doesn’t.
So many articles tell us to ‘stop drinking four-dollar-coffee-every-day’ and ‘cut-your-eating-out-budget-as-much-as-possible.’ What these articles fail to take into consideration is that most people—single, couples, and families—are already doing that. The issue isn’t in ‘budgeting’ or ‘not-eating-out’ but in income relative to expenses.
You can whittle down your budget all you like; until you get more income on a monthly basis—and you’re able to make this income stack—then it won’t matter how much you’re able to chop down.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t budget or track your expenses: what I’m saying is that cutting your expenses only goes so far—finding extra avenues of income is what will start to get the ball rolling. Once we understand this, we can get ourselves into a growth-mindset; we can not only cut expenses but we can also look for creative ways to have income offsetting expenses.
Once we realize this, we must take action. This is the part where we put our foot down and say we will do ‘whatever it takes’ to save for a basic emergency fund. I even wrote an article about how studying the advice of those who’ve achieved success can inspire us.
What follows are some of the methods that I—and many others—have been able to use in the 21st Century.
2. Start A ‘Scalable’ Side-Hustle
I want to go ahead and get these common Internet-based-methods out of the way first.
A lot of blogs and articles all over the internet talk about starting a ‘side-hustle.’ By now we’ve heard the term so much, it has almost lost any meaning. ‘Side-hustle’ this and ‘rise-and-grind’ that; it’s enough to make anybody’s ears bleed from overuse. Talking about hustling even more is not something everybody wants to hear—especially if they’re finding themselves working paycheck to paycheck.
The art of the ‘scalable’-side-hustle boils down to using the time you have outside of your normal job to take on another job—but this may be a job that won’t necessarily give you high amounts of cash when starting out. These side-hustles may involve undertakings such as:
–Starting a blog and monetizing it.
–Using freelance websites such as Fiverr or 99Designs to find jobs suited to individual talents you may possess.
-Use websites such as Medium or YouTube that will allow you to write and get paid based on the engagement of your readers or viewers. (It should be noted that these are long-term options for people who may not need an extra $1000 right away and are looking to test the internet-waters to market themselves. There are faster ways to make money listed below).
-Starting a freelance service (consulting, writing, design, editing, etc.) and reaching out to prospective clients.
-Flipping junk and acting as a reseller. (This involves getting items for dirt-cheap or free and then selling them for more on outlets like Ebay, Craigslist, and others).
Again, these acts may not yield immediate dividends—and some may not pan out at all—so while these are good ideas in practice, these won’t help those who desperately seeking cash immediately.
Which brings us to our next point…
3. Get a Quick-Extra-Money-Job.
These involve working around the hours of your full-time-job to bring in some extra cash. These jobs include bartending, waiting-tables, pizza-delivery, stocking shelves at a grocery store…you get the picture. They’re the ones where you can clock in for a few hours on multiple days and then clock back out. Money in, money out.
An ideal scenario—if possible—would be to have the extra money from this job go directly into a savings account. If you use other bank accounts to get your bills paid, then the money earned from the extra-job could go into something else. This is assuming you don’t already work two jobs to get your bills paid—which is why you may have to take on three to get the ball rolling.
One part of this involves a commitment to use up as much as your free time outside of school or work as you can. Although it may be tempting to hang out with friends or visit family members, a $1000-savings-milestone may require you to dump your extra time for several months…or even a year.
4. Sell Your Old Stuff.
I really didn’t want to put this one down. It’s almost so common-sense and rote that it would be like me telling you to go to the kitchen if you’re hungry. Even so, you can make a surprising amount of cash from putting old stuff you don’t use anymore out for sale.
-Do a traditional yard or garage sale.
-Put specialty items up for sale on websites like Ebay or Craigslist.
-Even do Facebook inquiries among friends about who might be interested in a big-ticket item (stereo, pieces of furniture, electronics, cars, etc).
Selling things like books or cookware won’t make you much money. If you happen to have some old electronics or furniture laying around that you don’t use anymore though, they can be a catalyst to start racking up savings.
Conclusion.
There’s no doubt that saving money is hard.
There’s also no doubt that if you don’t make a lot of money, it can seem impossible.
But with enough time dedicated to working multiple jobs, monetizing a service, or going all-out on the games of buying, reselling, or garage-selling, you increase your chances of being able to put away a larger amount of money a month than you would otherwise. This in turn can help lead to better saving habits and a sturdier financial future to rest on.
And again, I know how impossible it can be with things like medical bills, credit-card-debt, student loans, family members, basic-necessities, and others like these. Often times the people who preach the loudest about these types of methods don’t take into consideration that many people may already work two or three jobs just to stay afloat.
If that’s the case for anyone reading this, I offer the idea that even if you can make only $50 more in the cracks of free-time that you do have to do any extra work…(let alone even learning how to save your first one thousand dollars)…
…then I consider that not only to be progress…
…but $50 extra dollars that you didn’t have before.
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Let’s crush our dreams together.
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