How to Save Money like a Grade-Schooler

Having the discipline of saving is really difficult especially for those who really love to spend.

Here are some elementary, very childish I should say, ways of saving.

1. Use a Coin bank

This is a very basic thing you can teach your kids and I find it very effective as I also learned it from my parents. When I was a kid, it was exciting when the piggy bank gets full and feels really amazing how much money you have unknowingly accumulated. Today, I still use coin banks. I have a bear coin bank named beary and a crab named krabby. Hehe I only put 10 peso coins in them and when they get full, I can save as much as 1000 and I find that good enough. I can now go out to a dinner date with my girlfriend or watch Imax 3D with her.

The moment you develop that sense of saving, every time you see a 10 peso coin, you just can’t spend it and can’t wait to deposit it into your cute coin bank. This is very elementary but surprisingly effective. I have a new coin bank called money maze (see link) and I’m planning to put bills in it (no coins) and I’m pretty excited how much it can accumulate.

A word of caution: always make sure you have a lock so you won’t get tempted to open it until it is full. Hehe

2. Save your Cents

All big things start small and cents are the smallest of value when it comes to money. I save them. I put them in a clam-like container and accumulate them. It’s quite useful especially with jeepney fares. The minimum fare as of now is 7.50php and these jeepney drivers just don’t give you your 50 cent change. What I find funny is that sometimes when I look at my clam, I see 1 to 5 peso coins. Meaning, my siblings trade their coins with my cents. Hehe quite useful indeed.

3. Collect New Bills

Before, I collected new coins. Shiny ones. But didn’t last long. What I collected was a bunch of new bills. The ones that looked like they were ironed. I save a lot of them from 20, 50, 100, 200, 500 and 1000 peso bills. Amazingly, they are very hard to spend. Why? Because they look so new, so good not to spend. (Though worst case, I crumple them first when I have no choice but to really spend them so that I won't regret spending them). When I see these new bills from other people, I will always offer them a trade. When I get home, I don’t want them crumpled, so iron them. I don’t count them, so I won’t know how much money I have already saved. With that, I don’t get tempted to spend them. When I learned about investments, I counted them and was able to save a significant 5 figure amount (less than 20,000). Not bad for a college graduate wherein typically nobody saves at this time yet. I transferred my savings to an investment and now am starting to enjoy the benefits of interest rates.

Collecting new bills is a wise way of saving.

4. Have a lot of Wallets

I love wallets and I have a lot of them. Through the influence of out-of-this-world beliefs, all my wallets have bills in it because they say If one of your wallet which you do not use anymore doesn’t have a bill in it, you will have problems with money, thus if you have at least a single bill, you will prosper. Though I don’t know if those were the exact words, that’s how I understood it.

Amazingly, every time I don’t have money, I search all my wallets and find the amount that I need and making sure when I have extra money again, I will refill my wallets for me to prosper. It’s like an unlimited source of money when you have a lot of wallets as long as all your wallets have money in it.

Again, as I grow knowledgeable in terms of money, I now have big wallets: banks, savings in long-term healthcare, investments in stocks and mutual funds, and insurances. Soon, I’m hoping I can write about these big wallets, so that from elementary ways of saving we can now move to a higher level.

Good luck with your savings.