The 1% Financial Trick

In this post, I will share a simple saving trick that can help anyone to improve their financial life.

“Many times we override simple changes in our life due to the many deflectors we are exposed to every single day. No matter what we say, the society around us does control a share of our choices. I guess that is called living in a society.”

While I agree that there are unlimited benefits of being part of a society, we also have the other side of the coin.

Most of us are surrounded by compulsive consumers that are part of this massive “buying” economy which leads us towards this gigantic economic bubble where we buy what we wish and not what we need.

What many people don’t really think about, is that the choices of today will affect their future. Running away from this “consumerist” society is not easy at all, and does require quite a strong mental game.

For me personally, having the focus on the ultimate goal to be able to retire early and not depend on a 9-to-5 job to live, is a great motivator to take the control of my financial life.

Budgeting, saving and investing are be the main words coming out of this blog.

As all of these “-ing” terminations become part of our lives, the next step will most likely include improving them in a certain way.

The Simple Saving Trick

What if instead of setting unrealistic goals, such as “I want to save more next month”, we could simply take a baby step to improve our financial life? A simple saving trick wouldn’t be something worth trying?

So the game I played with myself was to increase by 1% each month, the following indicators:

  • 1. Total Income
  • 2. Saved Amount
  • 3. Invested Amount

How can I do it?

On the income side, one of the easiest ways to improve it is to sell something that we don’t really need or use anymore. No matter what we might think, believe me when I say we all have something worth selling.

Searching our wardrobes or opening boxes we have in the garage and there we go!

Other strategy can be of course to focus on a side income. I mention a few of them here.

The saved and invested amounts are actually the easy part. In my case, I have setup automatic transfers on a monthly basis to such accounts. Therefore, the only thing I need to is to add the 1% extra.

So let’s say you are saving $500 a month. The 1% is simply $5 extra. Does it sound really such a big effort? My guess is that we will not even notice it. So the next month it will be 1% of $505, so $5.05.

The key here is to keep on doing it every month and be consistent. To keep you motivated you can check my latest savings report.

It is also implicit that if we are increasing 1% in our income and saving/investing 2%, the difference will have to come from decreasing by 1% our expenses.

Whether we do this or try a 2% increase in our income is a possible choice. I tend to prefer what I can actually control and that would be my expenses…

What are the improvements you are doing in your financial life? Any other saving tricks I can take from you? Let me know in the comments below.