By now, you’ve probably heard that Americans, as a whole, are abysmal at keeping up an emergency savings account. The vast majority of people cannot scrape together four hundred dollars for car repairs, let alone cover something major, like roof damage or college tuition. While many of us know we need to save more, we don’t often think about our savings accounts, especially when times are good. But what happens if you suddenly find yourself in a position where you need to pay several medical bills or you (or your significant other) become furloughed? It is absolutely crucial to have a stockpile of easily-accessible funds, just in case life takes an unexpected twist.

But how do you get into a mindset that leads to saving more money? You might know the basics of saving more money, but how can you get motivated to do so?

Try one or more of the following steps:

1. Track Your Spending/Budget

Plenty of apps can help you track where your dollars go each month. By keeping track of your expenditures, you’ll be able to tell where your biggest expenses fall, and where you can potentially makes some cuts. You might find, for instance, that you spend way more on take-out food than you imagined. Or, you might discover that online shoe shopping is adding an extra hundred dollars each month to your expense list.

Once you have a handle on your spending, make a budget and commit to sticking to it! If you have a significant other, it’s important to get them on board as well. Not only can you discuss savings strategies, you can also cheer each other on to save more each month. And if you blow your budget? Don’t lose heart! Adjust your budget if need-be and commit to doing better next month.

2. Write a Savings Pledge

Though it might sound cheesy, writing down your savings goals in the form of a pledge actually works! According to a Forbes article by Mark Henricks, “A 2014 study that asked Americans to just think about their savings goals, ponder how it would feel to achieve them and then make a written pledge to work toward them encouraged significantly more saving than people who didn’t do the exercise.”

Try it for yourself. Define your savings goals by writing them down in a list. Then, visualize what life would be like if you actually reached those goals. How would you feel? What parts of life would improve? Then, write out your savings pledge and keep it somewhere where you will look at it regularly–you might hang it on a cork board at your desk or keep it taped to the back of your laptop. Then, do your best to achieve those goals.

3. Rely on a Little Peer Pressure

There’s nothing like a healthy dose of peer pressure to help you save! You might consider joining a local finance or budgeting group (search MeetUp.com, make a post about your intentions on NextDoor, or reach out to some friends who might be interested in supporting each other to save more). Joining forces with like-minded people can help give you both the encouragement and the pressure you need to practice smart saving. Check in regularly with your group to see how everyone is doing and to strategize saving opportunities.

If you really want to involve others in your saving plan, you might post about it on social media. Even if no one really cares about your intentions to save more, just posting that message will put a certain amount of pressure on you to follow through with your plan.

4. Save With a Purpose

Saving for some nebulous emergency that may or may not happen in the future is difficult to do. Saving with intentionality is a different story. If you have a goal for your savings (say, building up a fund for your child’s college tuition or preparing for the day you’ll need to purchase a new vehicle), you’re more likely to tuck money away. One 2019 study found that earmarking (allocating money for specific purposes) increased savings by 22 percent. Even if only a fraction of the money in your emergency savings account will go toward your earmarked purpose, you’ll still have a solid reason to save. Visualize your reason for saving (or even post a picture of your reason at your desk) and let that motivate you to tuck away more money each month.

5. Set Up Auto-Deposits

If all else fails, let technology do the saving for you! Set up an automatic transfer to occur each month (or twice per month) into a designated savings account. Even if you’re only funneling $30 at a time into your account, those deposits will add up. If that money never lands in your checking account, it’s easy to pretend it doesn’t exist (which will help you keep your hands off it until it’s needed). Talk to your bank about setting up an automatic transfer OR hop online and set it up yourself.

 

If you want to give your savings account a boost, it’s essential to get in the right mindset. Figure out the strategy that works best for you and STICK TO IT. When an emergency strikes, you’ll be prepared, instead of just another statistic.

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