3 Easy Savings Habits to Start Right Now

Don’t get stuck trying to get started saving money—just choose a few simple strategies and changes that will put extra cash in your pocket immediately. 

Review your subscriptions and put that money to work for you instead.

Podcasts, streaming services, digital subscriptions, cloud storage, apps you never use, free trials that expired and became a paid service—it’s easier than ever to digitally subscribe, and also to forget to unsubscribe when you no longer use something.

Those little subscriptions can add up. Let’s say you’ve got an app for $3.99 a month, a $17.99 Netflix account, Amazon Prime for $119 annually, a weekly newspaper at $1 per week, and you signed up for a free trial for an investment website membership that converted to a full membership at $99 a year. That’s $531.76 in subscriptions each year that you may not even realize you’re paying for or may not even need.

Now, let’s round it to $532 for ease, and say you invested that money each year for 10 years at a conservative 4% rate of return. In 10 years, you’d have $7,175.

The good news here is you can download an app like Truebill to identify recurring subscriptions and cancel them with a tap of your phone.

Check out a Health Savings Account

If you don’t have a Health Savings Account, or HSA, you’re breaking your financial advisor’s heart—and here’s why.

An HSA allows you to pay for out-of-pocket healthcare expenses tax-free, and an HSA is the only triple-tax advantaged savings product out there. That means the money you save to an HSA saves you from paying taxes in 3 ways:

• You don’t pay taxes on the money you save to an HSA
• You don’t pay taxes on money withdrawn from an HSA tied to an investment fund
• You can count the money you contribute to an HSA as a tax deduction.

Before setting up an HSA, a good place to start is to talk with your financial advisor about your goals, priorities, and eligibility.

Track your spending.

Quite simply, you can’t save or spend what you don’t know you have, and there’s nothing like the wake-up call of seeing your transactions all laid out in front of you each month. Tracking your spending is the first step in creating a budget, creating an emergency fund, or setting a savings goal.

Your financial advisor has access to professional wealth management platforms like eMoney Advisor, which effortlessly track spending, income, net worth, and investments all in one intuitive portal. Other applications like mint.com can help you input and track spending and give you a good idea of where you need to cut back or change priorities.

At Aspen Wealth Strategies we know that when it comes to money, especially the feeling of needing more, anxiety can stop us before we even begin. By just taking small steps and getting expert guidance and support, you can make big strides toward creating the financial future of your dreams.