People often ask me, How can I possibly save a tenth of what I earn when all I earn is not even enough for my day-to-day living expenses?

My Answer:
Until you start to discipline yourself to live on less than you earn and value yourself enough to start building a personal fund to depend on, you will constantly be on the month-to-month wages treadmill.

Once you learn to manage the little money you have coming in now comfortably, you will then be able to manage a lot more money when it comes your way.

Each of us has desires that are often confused with necessary living expenses. We will all have far more desires than our earnings can gratify. Even if we spent all our earnings to gratify our desires, we would still have many more ungratified desires.

When we make the mistake of confusing our necessary living expenses with our wants and desires, the latter will always grow to equal our income and in some cases exceed it until we protest otherwise.

There are limits to everything in this world and there are limits to how many desires we can gratify. Our wants and desires will grow when we allow the possibility of their gratification.

The most effective way to find and reduce your spending is to take a close careful look at your spending habits to determine what you can eliminate. Demand a hundred or even two hundred percent appreciated value for everything you spend money on.

Make a list of all your desires and decide on which ones are necessary and attainable within nine-tenth of your earnings (in some cases seven-tenth, if you are paying off debts). Simply cross out the rest and consider them a part of the multitude of wants and desires that must go ungratified and do not regret them.

Keep working at reducing your expenditure to realise more money to start investing.

The purpose of a budget is twofold:

To realize that you are in charge of your money, and

To help you save more money to invest in your future.

It enables you distinguish between your most cherished desires and casual ones. It highlights the cracks within your expenditure and allows you to seal them thereby controlling your expenditure.

Budget to have enough to pay for your necessities to fulfil your most worthwhile desires without spending more than ninety percent of your income. Working with a budget also helps you easily determine whether to decrease your spending or increase your income. Ideally, it works better to do both.

There is a lot to be said for being frugal. Frugality is not penny-pinching. It is more about making wise decisions about spending and not being wasteful. Just think, when you have achieved a level of financial independence you can buy whatever takes your fancy, but for now it makes better sense to divert your money to a vehicle that is sure to generate you more money.

It is important to feel wonderful about the reason for your frugality and save essential money to invest or pay off debts. This creates this the right energy that will keep your flow of prosperity going and attract more money, wealth and prosperity to you. If you feel miserly or hard done by, you may be blocking your flow of prosperity.

Action: Make a list of all your desires and decide on which ones are necessary and attainable within nine-tenth of your earnings.

Simply cross out the rest and consider them a part of the multitude of wants and desires that must go ungratified and do not regret them.

Keep working at reducing your expenditure to realise more money to start investing with.