Saving is that unspent part of your earnings or income you set aside to generate interest and represent a seed for future growth. The Webster's English Dictionary defines an interest-earning savings account as a bank account on which cheques are not drawn.
It is prudent to have a savings account; it is powerful to maintain it. People who learn and apply the art of saving hold the key to financial prosperity, and all others must necessarily depend on them for upkeep and survival. Those who cannot master the art of saving are not safe.
Saving is an art, like typing, soccer, carpentry, driving, or surgery, that can be learned. The practice is simple, and like all new excellent habits, a certain mental shift is required at the onset.
In the beginning, we need to overcome some hindrances. William Feather puts it this way: "Just as soon as we make a good resolution, we get into a situation that makes its observance unbearable".
Have you ever noticed that opposing temptations set in when you make up your mind to keep some money in your new savings account? Fresh, urgent, unexpected, unavoidable expenses rear their ugly heads. Your senior sister would need all you have and a little more to buy drugs for her hospitalized baby, the children would come home from school demanding to purchase new books, your fridge would suddenly breakdown and require immediate repair, or you could see the final red notice on a bill "must be paid this week". This is a fact of life.
For some reason, nature institutes these measures to test the beginner's seriousness or commitment to the task of a new life or a worthwhile discipline. This is the first hurdle that must be pounded or surmounted. You will see this in every new resolution. For instance, is it not when you eventually desire to throw away the cookies and begin your dietary or slimming adventure that scores of party and menu invitations start to arrive at your post?
Every positive action that carries a great promise for advancement naturally demands that you overcome inertia. A stationary object will remain where it is until an outside force causes it to move. Once moving, it shall require much less force to perpetuate its motion. This is called Newton's Law of Motion. It is much less easy to continue saving than to begin saving.
The secret of progress is simple. Begin. The key is to be aware of these hindrances or opposing forces as they arrive and resist the temptation to give in. Stay committed to your commitment.
Find other means of meeting the unexpected and urgent expenses. Detach yourself from the process or possession. Be like an intelligent observer, a witness to the growing treasure. Put yourself in the position of a loyal trustee. Surrender attachment to the money saved.
What you do is open a savings account and get this money deducted from your income before you see or touch it. I read this advice many years ago and put it to work, and it changed my financial life permanently.
Any tested principle of success is a thousand times better than no principle at all. It is prudent to experiment on this tried, tested, and proven formula. The result comes only from the application, not from mere reading.
Therefore, you will be doing yourself, your family, and friends a great service if you would take action on this idea today. Write a letter to your bank manager, authorizing him to open special savings account in your name and transfer into it ten per cent of whatever salary you earn or whatever profit you generate from your business at the end of every month. Start today.
The key is to make it regular and to make it automatic. Your job is to pay yourself first. Get the money into hiding before you receive the rest. Give the bank a standing order to roll over both the monthly savings and the accrued interest. The rate may require negotiation if the sum becomes substantial.
Per a well-known adage, the rich save the first portion of their money and spends the rest while the poor spend the first portion of their earnings and then saves the rest; and as you know, you always have nothing left to save if you begin by spending the first portion.
How do we overcome the pain of starting a saving program that will compel us to spend less? You may benefit from a mental shift by assuming that you were now coping with extra taxation, or you convince yourself that you currently earn less. Either will do. Both may prove excellent. And if it were indeed true that the 80% was all there to spend, you would learn to cope with it.
So you begin, nevertheless, and like all good habits, it becomes surprisingly easy to operate pleasantly to continue. Many people have started with as low as 1%, then 5%, then 10%, 15%, etc.
Wealth building is like tree planting. The giant oak tree develops from the tiny acorn. There is a saying: "The best time to plant the oak tree was 100 years ago, and the next best time is now". The best time to start this kind of savings was probably twenty or thirty years ago, but if you haven't done it until now, the next best time is today.
When mature, your saving tree confers a comfortable shade for you and your family. Regular retreat under its cover lifts your spirit, stimulates your determination, grants you zeal and perseverance, calms your spirit into a restful sleep, and energize your resolve into higher productivity. It keeps you cheerful, positive, friendly, safe, and secure.
As you begin saving, soon you find that you are not shorter of the fund than the time you didn't save. Almost every wealthy person started up very poor. To join the ranks of the rich, you need to think as they think, do what they do, learn and apply their principles and consequently, get the same result.
The one hundred out of every one thousand Naira you put away now will one day accumulate, grow, mature, and enroll in the business of showering interests into your pocket. The key is to allow these savings to meet each other in your account, month after month, year after year until it becomes ripe and yields more fruits that eventually compound interest. This would ultimately permit you to enjoy the power and benefits of high-yield investments.
First, you work for the money, then the money begins to work for you. This is why it must never be spent on a home, a car, a holiday, or any sort of material thing. This saving is sometimes called opportunity money for the simple fact that it attracts opportunities to you as the money grows. It also permits you to take advantage of such opportunities as they appear.
Money is the sweat of your brow, a part of your energy stored in paper form. It is not physical but spiritual. You wake up every morning to labour, sweat, or even bleed in the process of rendering valuable service to others; you are paid back not with blood or sweat but a paper representation of that. Your cash is a part of your life. Teilhard de Chardin wrote, "We are not human beings having a human experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience".
Your cash is a portion of you, the same way a part possesses the attribute of a whole. Your cash is spiritual. When you repeatedly store away an amount month after month, it begins to form a cycle or rhythm, not unlike other natural, regular rhythms or cycles. This cycle starts to share the spiritual values enjoyed by all-natural cycles, like that of the lunar month (moon), the cycle of day and night, the menstrual cycle, the rhythm of the heartbeat, the seasonal cycle of winter, spring, summer, and fall, to mention a few.
Nature supports all rhythms, including the regularity of your savings. In addition, as the money continues to grow, it begins to have the attributes exhibited by all living things that grow, namely, the capacity to appropriate the needed intelligence necessary to select resources and circumstances that attract such nutrients that are required to further its growth.
Any such circumstance can be in the form of new positions, new jobs, fresh income, higher pay, which will come to you and sustain the regularity and accelerate the growth. It has been said that "to him, that has, more shall be added, and from him, that has not, even the little he has, shall be taken away and given to him that has". This is in keeping with this phenomenon.
The foregoing explains why the money you save attracts more money, better opportunities, more gains, greater interest, and better yields. More leads to more is a natural maxim. Loss leads to greater loss is also a maxim.
Just as regular savings surround you with a positive aura, which attracts positive environments and circumstances into your life, regular borrowing begets regular sorrowing. A man who always asks for a loan is always left alone. Debt consciousness is poverty consciousness, and it is the precursor of all forms of misery, lack, bad luck, and misfortune of all shapes and descriptions. This is not what you want.
The Psychology of Saving
Saving increases your self-worth makes you value yourself more. It boosts your self-esteem and improves your level of self-confidence. By cultivating a saving habit, you walk, talk and smile broadly. You laugh more generously and heartily.
A confident man at work is pleasant to behold. He naturally appears more competent to an intelligent observer. Confidence makes you look more like a pro, an expert at work. You dare.
If you are self-employed, you attract more customers and generate new products and better services. If you are an employee, your manager accords you with higher positions and better pay upon noticing your cheerful, optimistic, and magnetic disposition. This leads to more money and then higher savings constituting an endless positive multiplier system.
Your work begins to have greater meaning as you begin to have more reasons to jump out of bed in the morning. You are appreciated and celebrated. There is this fearless approach to daily living that accompanies regular saving. The thought that you have a growing reserve instills serenity and calmness in your life. You develop a feeling of security to the degree to which the money grows. This is why fear seems to be replaced by love and courage among the rich, the truly rich.
The Essence of Saving
A country has its savings as an external reserve. The more reserve it has, the more it is served by citizens of other nations. A nation that keeps no external resource shall condemn its citizens, as waiters, to serve other countries that have.
A company keeps its savings as retained earning or sinking funds. Any corporation that fails to maintain an ongoing sinking fund is bound to fall.
A bank is mandated to keep its savings as a capital base. It is on this basis that it is permitted to function as a credible and durable financial institution.
You can see now that saving represents the live-wire of commerce and industry and progress and prosperity. No one, including you, can afford not to save. Once again, he who cannot save is not safe.
Tell me, how wise is he? I cannot consider him truly prudent, a man who affirms that saving is unnecessary or who claims that it is too late or too early to start saving. The man who does not save, however huge, is always a servant to a saver, and the longer their relationship, the deeper the intensity of his servitude. Regular savings invariably grant him the needed freedom from this sort of self-imposed slavery.
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