How To Save

This is really what the world has come to - we now have an entire science of teaching people how to save money. I can remember as a kid my mother would send me to school every Wednesday with 20c in a small folder, when the Banking Lady would come to our school. She would write down the new total in my passbook and I would see that amount growing, stashed away somewhere in a big building called The Bank. Well-intentioned (and forming a good habit) but since I, personally, hadn't saved that money or avoided spending it in the lead-up to Wednesday morning, I am not sure that it taught me how to save.

All of these "how to" guides seem to have the same issue. They all have different methods of dealing with your money (from the envelope system, to the snowball system, to everything in between) and portioning up your earnings into different places based on priorities. Or stashing spare change, or using an app to round up. All well and good. But they have a fundamental baseline, and that is, they assume that you don't know where your money is going. That you'll suddenly, once you have a system, discover the loose change (or the spare money for rounding up) and that the extras will go into a special place for either paying down debt or saving for a rainy day. That it's not a problem of inadequate money, just a problem of lost money.

The focus is wrong.

We shouldn't be learning how to save. We should be un-learning how to spend.

The good news is, there is more support than there used to be. We have many growing movements. People who want to protect the environment, people who love tiny houses, minimalists, people who want to spend less, we can all learn small things from one another. You don't need to become a crazy hippie who knits their own oat milk and goes barefoot all year round. (Although oat milk is really cheap to make, if it takes your fancy.)

So, the secret of how to save? Focus on not spending. I am a work in progress myself!