When you think about it, there are lots of ways to put money into savings:

You could deposit money into a savings account manually.

You could automate the process so that part of your paycheck is put into a savings account each month.

Et cetera.

Here’s my favorite way. (It could actually be thousands of different ways: it’s an open-ended invitation)

Make a game out of saving money

It’s about creatively looking for different ways to save. Here’s an example:

I bought a car a few months ago, and I put down a huge down payment because I wanted the monthly payments to be under $250 per month. The monthly payment worked out to something like $224.

I got the loan from a credit union, so they made me open up a checking account with them where my car payments would come from.

So I set up two automatic transfers each month:

1. Each month, $250 is transferred from my regular checking account to the credit union account that pays my car payments.
2. Then, the car payment of $224 is made from the same account

See what happens? Each month, I’m putting more into that account than is coming out. $250 goes in, $224 comes out. $26 accumulates there each month.

It’s not a ton of money, but it matters. This is ingenious on so many levels, it’s amazing to see how it works.

Since money is accumulating in that account, that gives me a built-in buffer against something unexpected that might cause me to miss a payment (aside from my regular savings).

Since $26 is a small amount of money, I’m not going to have to adjust my lifestyle to compensate. People tend to reach an equilibrium of spending where they will just adjust on the fly to other changes in spending.

In the long run, the money adds up. It’s a 5-year car loan, so that’s about $1,500 over the lifetime of the loan. That’s money I could put toward the down payment on my next car, invest, or do whatever I want with.

I often ask people a question that always gets a yes answer: could you use $1,500 right now? Well in that case, don’t you wish you had started saving a small amount each month a long time ago?

Everyone says yes because it’s easy to see the payoff looking back. It’s much harder to make small sacrifices now for a payoff later on.

Credit card rewards programs are basically the same thing; when you check your rewards balance, isn’t it cool to see how much you’ve earned? Those are miles towards a plane ticket, or money, prizes, or whatever your particular rewards program offers.

Other Games You Can Play

I called this a game because it’s fun. The $26 a month makes no difference to my lifestyle. It is purely an exercise in watching money slowly accumulate in this one account just to show that I can do it.

This is something you do in addition to saving money directly from your paycheck each month. It’s meant to get you thinking consciously about saving money so that the habits get down into your bones and generate the mindset you need to be wealthy in the long run. The dollars you save playing these games won’t make you rich, but the mindset and habits will.

This mindset is an invitation to see what games you can invent. And remember–saving even a few dollars per month puts you in a completely different universe than people to spend more than they make and accumulate debt.

Here are some other ideas. Have fun with these. As dull as it is, saving money can be fun if you choose to view it that way:

• Put pocket change into a big jar. This one is great for kids. If you have kids, they will count the change in there every day if you let them. Don’t take any change out for a good year, at least.
• If you don’t use cash much (I don’t), there are actually debit cards that will do the same thing for you. Each purchase you make, they round up to the nearest dollar and deposit the change directly into a savings account. So if you buy something for $12.10, they would round up to $13.00 and put $0.90 into your savings account. Here’s Bank of America’s card that does this.
• Swear jar: every time you or someone in your house swears, put a dollar in the swear jar. Or if that’s not your thing, choose something you’d like to give up. Say, overpriced coffee. Each time you have a craving for your Chai-whatever, put that amount of money into a jar instead. Congratulate yourself for kicking a bad habit and developing a good one at the same time.

There’s no limit to what you can come up with here, so again have fun with it. Doesn’t matter if you’re saving a penny a year, the point is to change your perspective on saving so that it becomes a “get to” instead of a “have to.”

Once you’ve got that mindset and develop the habit of saving, you’re golden.