Day 4: Separate Your Money - Seven Dollar Millionaire

Separate Your Money

We’ve talked in other places how you need to save before you spend and how you only get paid when you save, but your money doesn’t come to you separated into different kinds for different things.

It would be nice if someone did that for you in advance, wouldn’t it?

“Here’s your money for saving. Look at it, it’s a different colour, you can’t spend that in the shop, you can only save it. And now here’s your money for rent, that’s different. And here’s your money for your shopping, which is different again. You can use those for saving, if you’re good, but the saving money can only go in your savings.”

That would make life easier, but it doesn’t happen and it won’t – unless you do it for yourself.

That’s what all the really successful savers do for themselves. They separate their money as soon as they get it into saving (because that comes first, remember), rent, utilities and other spending.

That’s what you have to do. Imagine that the money you want to save is a different colour from all your other money and separate it.

If that means you put $7 to one side every single day, then you do that. If it means you put $50 in a different envelope at the end of every week, then that’s what you do. If you can automate your bank to send at least $210 of every monthly salary from your current account to your savings account, then do that instead. Whatever you need to do to separate your saving money from your spending money, do it.

It’s the first stage of controlling what you do with your money, and the most important one. Over time you can build more complicated spending budgets that enable you to take real control of your life, but saving comes first. And that’s why you separate it first.