How do you get to the stage where you have enough to save?
In a previous post, I categorised income sources into employment, self-employment, business and investment. Even if you are still an employee, you should seek to have other means of generating income. Some ideas on how to achieve this is shown in below pictures obtained from @savetoinvest on instagram 
In addition, there is the need to critically assess what you are spending money on and decide: is it necessary? Can you do without it for now, with a view to benefitting at a later date (delayed gratification)? Are you by any chance like me, spending on duplicated luxuries like Amazon Prime, Kindle Unlimited and Netflix, and not really fully utilising any? If you feel you can’t completely stop all subscriptions, then consider maintaining only one of the duplicated subscriptions. Every penny saved would eventually go towards building your saving pot. Some other things we spend money on, that minimises what the amount we can put towards our saving pot are aptly depicted below by @savetoinvest
Another key thing to consider before you start building your saving pot is how to pay down your debts (excluding mortgages). Are you servicing any debts (e.g. loans, credit cards, hire purchase, etc.)? Rather than immediately beginning to save any surplus or additional income generated from cutting out luxuries and finding additional income sources, it is usually more prudent to pay down/off your debts. This is especially the case when the interest rate being paid on the debt is higher than the interest rate on the savings. However, in some situations, the cost of paying down the debts (redemption fees) could be substantial, so might be better to keep servicing it monthly. So with this point, there is no blanket rule, rather you have to weigh up the cost/benefit of paying down/off your debts. Ideally though, you will pay off any debt not generating income for you.
In summary, keep your income high and your expenses low, that way you will quickly get to that place where you have income that is surplus to your immediate requirements.
WARNING: DO NOT LET YOUR EXPENSES GROW WITH YOUR INCOME.
Maintain the same level of expenses even when your income grows. Tough to do, but even if you can’t do that perhaps grow your expenses at a very minimal rate to the rate of additional income being generated. This is critical to being able to begin building your saving pot/the amount you are able to save.
Once we begin to generate surplus income, we are at the stage where we can begin to ‘save’ (that age old wisdom passed down by most of our mothers’). We’d pick up on this in subsequent posts.
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