To make your life to be SAFE and WEALTHY. You must know these 5 good ways to spend money and how to put it in when you receive your budget salary.
The way you work with your budget will decide who you are and how rich you can be.
Everyone wants to be good at budgeting and saving, but it doesn’t mean that anyone can be.
Nowadays, we hear people talk a lot about how to earn passive income; how to budget salary better, how to save and invest money, etc.
And after years learn and experience about earning money, I recognize that
If you are serious about money, it will be serious with you back.
But if you don’t care about it, it will never care about you.
When you know the good ways to spend money appropriately, it can create a massive uplift for yourself. But when you don’t learn to put it at the right place and the right time, you will get in trouble with your money.
Understanding WHAT and WHY you should separate your money into different accounts will help you to master your ability to control the money and make the money itself create more income for you!
And here is the list of 5 good ways to spend money wisely that I figured out for myself after a couple of years of working.
Good ways to spend money No.1: Your Retirement Fund.
Take a part of your income into this fund even before you receive a salary. It will help you to save for your future life.
If you live in America, you will be familiar with the 401K fund. If you live in Vietnam, you will be familiar with the thing called “Retirement Fund” where your money will be saved for your retirement time monthly.
By doing this, when people reach the age of retirement, they don’t need to worry about financial issues anymore. Because these funds will pay “the salary for your retirement”.
As I see the area where my grandparents are living, both of them have retired salary packages while other elder people who live nearby don’t have this source of income.
The life of my grandparents is totally more enjoyable and comfortable than others.
The retirement salary helps my grandparents to live safely without worrying about financial issues and they can even save a little bit of money to travel by themselves. While the other elder neighbors still need to work to earn money daily.
And even many of them are younger than my grandfather, but their facial appearance is totally older, and have poorer health. As they have so much pressure about earning money and need to work at the old ages.
This is the reason why I started to save money for my retirement fund at a young age. Because I understand how valuable it is if you have a retirement salary.
In addition, if you can start to invest in your retirement fund from a young age, the higher amount of income you will receive when you retire.
Good ways to spend money No.2: Checking account
To pay for your direct payments.
And it helps you to control and separate the amount of money you need to pay monthly directly from your bank account.
For me, this account I use to pay for direct payment such as the internet, student debts, monthly subscriptions from the services I use such as Canvas, Medium, Adobe,…
The reason why you should have it is because
- It helps you to track how much money you need to spend monthly directly.
- Help you to avoid the penalty fees when you pay late. (As I used to forget about direct payment and let my account run out of money for just an hour. Then, I miss the direct payment deadline and lead to being charged 15% more for the delay fee).
It was just an hour but I paid 30 dollars more because I forgot to fill up my bank account.
This is really a waste of money and leads me to make a decision to separate my checking account from another one.
So, from there, every month, I always put enough money in this account and just serve for one purpose only — to pay for my debit.
But when you keep it in the same bank account, it can ruin your financial game. Because, sometimes, when you run out of your money and forgot to add money to it for the direct payment deadline, it wastes money unnecessarily.
Good ways to spend money No.3: – Necessity account
It helps you to control your spending a lot.
And first of all, you need to have the right mindset about the difference between what you need and what you want.
“What you need” are the things you need to have for a standard living, such as food, a place to live, healthcare, transportations, facilities,…
But “What you want” are the things that you want but aren’t really necessary for your daily life, if you don’t have it, your life still keeps going on normally.
For example, people want to own a luxury bag or a supercar, but these things are not compulsory to have for anyone to survive.
And the necessity account is an account that you use to track what you need to spend daily. By doing this, it helps you to control the amount of money spent and know if we need to adjust this amount of money to spend more effectively.
If you merge this account with your main account, it makes it harder for you to track your spending on necessary things. And normally will lead to the case that you spend more money than you expected, especially on what you want rather than what you really need.
This is the reason why I can come up with tips for saving more than 2000$ per month when I studied for my master’s degree.
Good ways to spend money No.4: – The emergency fund
It will save your life during the toughest times.
It is a fund where you should have from 3–6 months your income money in, follow the author Dave Ramsey recommend in his book “The Total Money Makeover”.
So if you face any urgent problems in life such as losing your jobs, being injured, or going to the hospital, you still have a fund to pay for these demands when you can’t work to earn money.
However, personally, I believe that this amount of money should be around one year of income. So it will save you better in the tough times.
This is becoming more accurate during the Covid 19 time when many countries were in lockdown for nearly a year and millions of people lost their jobs.
If you just have 3–6 months of the emergency fund, and the Covid in your country makes you lose your income for nearly a year, you will be very struggling!
So if you don’t have an emergency yet, let’s start to make it ASAP.
It will be your own angel when you face a struggle.
Some notes when starting your emergency fund
- It needs to be easy to access
- Should be at least 5% of your income (or 10%) depending on your choice.
- The more you can earn, the more you can add to your emergency fund.
Good ways to spend money No.5: Investment Fund
This is what makes you really rich, not your wage.
When you want to earn a fortune, an investment fund is what you need to have.
Because the people who want to be rich need to invest. It is not just spending their time to earn a limited wage monthly from the company they work for.
When you invest in the right strategy, you can get a lot of money into your pocket in a short period of time.
Some potential ways that you can invest
Real estate
Bonds
Stock market
Etc,…
There are a lot of methods that you can invest your money in and get a high Return on Investment (ROI).
But the first step before getting the massive ROI is having your own investment fund.
If you don’t start to build your portfolio with an investment fund, how can you find the money to invest and get a massive outcome later on.
In the beginning, this amount of money can be just a small part of your income, around 5–10% as I recommend.
And when you start to invest with this small amount of money, it helps you to control money better and learn from investment mistakes before moving to the bigger investment.
In the investment market, you can earn more, but also can lose more. So let’s learn it carefully before doing it. But make sure to build your investment fund from now.
So when the opportunity comes, you can get it!
Final Thought
Having money is important, but knowing how to spend it effectively is even more important.
This is the reason why there are so many athletes who are millionaires just after a couple of retired years being broken.
Because the mindset about how to spend the money from them is limited.
They don’t actually know how to use their money to make their life safe, such as investing in real estate, or buying life insurance, or putting money in 401K,…
Instead, spending their massive assets on parties, having fun and luxurious things will make this person be broke even before he can recognize it.
To sum up, I hope that the list will help you to understand more about your money and the way how you can make it work for you effectively.
Wish you all the best with your financial game!
Vocabulary
- Retirement fund: Quỹ hưu trí
- Investment Fund: Quỹ đầu tư
- Checking account: Tài khoản vãng lai – là một loại tài khoản tiền gửi được mở tại ngân hàng hoặc tổ chức tài chính nào đó với mục đích là cung ứng cho những nhu cầu cá nhân an toàn và nhanh chóng.
- Necessity account: Tài khoản chi tiêu cần thiết, phục vụ cho nhu cầu thiết yếu mỗi ngày của bạn và gia đình, như chi phí ăn uống, xăng xe, điện thoại, tiền học…
- The emergency fund: Quỹ khẩn cấp
- ASAP: Nhanh nhất có thể (as soon as possible)
