I really hate delivering bad news, but there’s no way around this. You’re not getting any younger. Time is marching on. You can fight it all you want, but the time will pass anyway. The important thing to do is focus your time, attention and energy on answering the following question – are you doing what’s necessary today to create the life that you really want?
Happily, you’re the person who decides which of your dreams to pursue. You’re the one who knows what truly delights your heart, what always replenishes your soul. You get to decide which path to follow in order to achieve the goals that you have set for your life. Every day is an opportunity for you to better understand yourself and the way you interact with the rest of the world.
Whatever it is that you want to achieve, there’s a financial cost to it. I don’t care if you want to travel, start your own business, buy rental properties, take a sabbatical, race in the Grand Prix, go sky-diving, or spend a week at home unplugged from the rest of the world. It’s going to cost you some money.
Start Saving Today
Start saving for your dreams now, even if they aren’t fully fleshed out. It hardly matters where you are in the stage of making your dreams come true. When the opportunity arrives, you should have some money set aside to chase those dreams. I accept that there are situations where money should not be the factor holding you back, but I would encourage you to minimize those situations as much as possible.
When I was 16 years old, I got my first part-time job in a grocery store. It wasn’t glamorous, nor was I well paid. If I remember, I was earning $4.85 per hour. I didn’t work a lot of hours either, since I was in school and living at home. I had to open a chequing account to deposit my paycheque, since this job existed before the days of online banking.
Even though I was 16 and I didn’t know beans from potatoes, I knew enough to open a savings account at the same time that I opened my chequing account. At the time, I’d never heard of automatic transfers. Every two weeks, I would receive my paycheque, then I would deposit it into my account with the bank teller. I would then walk over to the bank machine and transfer $50 from my chequing account to my savings account. I have no idea why I didn’t just ask the teller to do the transfer for me while I was at her wicket. Maybe I was trying to increase my step-count? In any event, I went through this process every two weeks until I got a job at a different bank and learned how to make the online banking system work for me.
“$50? Big deal!”
You’re right, Dear Reader. On its face, $50 is hardly enough for a grown-up to get excited about. It’s the kind of money that would delight a 3-year old at the toy store, but hardly enough to generate glee in an adult with adult-sized bills.
Habits are the Game-Changer
However, the importance of my story isn’t the $50. I’m telling you my story to impart the lesson that saving money has been the key to funding my dreams. I saved $50 every two weeks for years and years. What was most important was the habit of savings, not the amount. As I got older, I earned more money and I increased the amount that was set aside every two weeks. The habit stayed the same, even though the amount changed.
And once the habit was in place, it’s never disappeared. My “little savings habit” has allowed me to travel internationally, fund my RRSP and TFSA, buy a home, build an army of money soldiers, and generally partake in social events with family and friends.
I’ll be forever grateful to my parents who taught me about having dreams, creating habits, and saving money. My parents’ dream was for us to go to school, and they found a way to fund that dream. Part of the funding efforts went on behind the scenes as they invested all out Baby Bonus money instead of spending those cheques each month.
The other part of funding their dream was overt. When my brother and I were little, my father had created the habit of giving each of us $10 every two weeks from his paycheque. We would carefully fold that money and put it into our piggy-banks. Twice a year, we would empty our piggy-banks. My father would sit us down and make us fill out deposit slips for our bank. I still remember unfolding the money and clipping it together with the deposit slip before taking it to the bank. That money would ultimately go towards buying Canada Savings Bonds. Eventually, that money paid for our post-secondary education.
The Power is Yours
Whatever you dreams are, you have the power to create the savings habit now. Whether you start with $1 per day, $10 per paycheque or $50 per month, just start setting the money aside. The habit is more important than the amount. Once the habit is in place, you’ll increase the amount as you pay off other debts, as you eliminate expenses that don’t bring you joy, and as your income increases.
Create an automatic savings plan for yourself. Divert this money away from the funds that you rely on for your day-to-day needs. Use the savings habit to ensure that your precious and limited time is spent on the experiences that bring you the most joy. The time will pass anyway.
