Saving Means Looking Forward | Saving

   

We all save because we have something to look forward to. Something to look forward to gives us a reason to live, right. Ok, I’m getting a little too heavy so let me calm down a bit :-o. One thing my family and I like to do is try out different restaurants/foods. So we have a separate Restaurant/Dining food budget.

 

Recently we wanted to try this steak place and it’s more expensive than the usual places we go to eat out. So in order to save for it, we deliberately didn’t eat out for the first two weeks of the month and scheduled to go there the third week of the month.

 

It also helped because we got creative making different types of meals at home as well and with leftovers from the previous day (stuffed chicken with sauteed veggies and cheese with garlic bread resulting in a leftover creation of chicken burritos with diced chicken, more veggies and a sweet and spicy sauce). …ok now I’m almost salivating on this keyboard, back to the topic at hand. As a result, we looked forward to going there. At the restaurant, we lived it up! We got appetizers, steaks, and dessert! Not to mention we ate hardly anything all day until that evening.

 

Looking forward can mean things like a fancy restaurant, a weekend getaway, or a pair of new Gucci loafers. The point if you have a purpose for saving you will strive harder to achieve that purpose and look forward to achieving it. And to be able to look forward to something, you may have to deprive yourself a bit in order to save for that something. Make sense right? Of course, it does, lol! Very hypothetically, a weekend getaway at the beach 2 or 3 hours away could cost between $1,000 to $2,000 for a typical family of 4.

 

If this is you only vacation for the year to take in August and you start saving in January, maybe you can save $200+ each month and that’ll get you to over $1400 by the end of July ($200 X 7 months). If you’re due one, maybe you can use some of that tax refund money to get to that savings number faster.

 

The bottom line is looking forward to something means planning and saving for it now, or is it the other way around as captioned in the title of this post? Well, I guess it can work both ways!