Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #1 — It’s Spending That Makes You Rich!
The strategy usually used to encourage saving is to suggest that spending is bad. I don’t buy it.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #2 — Save the Way You Spend
Many people who say that they don’t know how to save put considerable effort into making informed decisions to buy cars or houses or televisions or vacations. They are comparing value propositions. That’s what you do when you elect to allocate money to spending or to saving.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #3 — Retire Different!
Retirement is not an all-or-nothing proposition. We overcome paycheck dependence in stages as we reach higher levels of financial freedom. You don’t need to stop working to assert greater control over your life by, for example, taking work that pays less but provides more fulfillment. And you never need to give up the joys of work altogether.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #4 — If Saving is the Right Thing to Do, Why Does it Make You Feel so Cheap?
We use words like “miser” to describe savers. We characterize spenders as “generous.” That’s a problem.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #5 — Pay Yourself Last
The advice to “Pay Yourself First” really does work; it has helped a lot of people advance from being non-savers to being savers. The problem with forced saving is that it puts a ceiling on saving as well as a floor. The world’s most effective savers save only when they see a strong value proposition in doing so (which is often).
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #6 — Putting the Personal Back into Personal Finance
The purpose of saving is to enhance your enjoyment of life. You don’t get to where you want to be by studying compounding tables (at least not at first — that sort of thing comes later). You get to where you want to be by identifying ways in which saving can help you achieve the Life Goals that are most important to you and you alone.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #7 — What Color Package Will You Soon be Carrying Home from The Freedom Store?
We think of saving as not spending. No. Saving is a positive. We save to attain The New Luxuries — plentiful free time and soul-satisfying work.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #8 — We’re Practical Dreamers and That Makes All the Difference
I have a distaste for the excessively practical; dreams are the spice of life. To dream aimlessly is worse than not to dream at all; it wastes time, and, in many cases, it’s outright dangerous. It’s the tension between the practical and the dreamy that energizes the Passion Saver.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #9 — Pay Increases Are Not Enough
If your salary goes up steadily but you are not enhancing your skills or developing new contacts or adding to your level of financial freedom, you are setting yourself up for a major hurt. You are becoming more dependent on a paycheck with each passing year rather than less so.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #10 — The Last Days of Paycheck Dependence
It’s human nature to complain about how tough we have it. There’s plenty to complain about in the modern world. I don’t think that those of us who live in the modern industrialized economies can rightly complain too much about our buying power, however. The increase in middle-class buying power is one of the most positive developments of the past century. We need to recognize how good we have it (on this point, at least) before we can hope to put our buying power to its best possible use.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #11 — Survival Spending Is Like Sacrifice Saving
We think of spending as exciting. Is it really? Some types of spending are not exciting at all. How turned on do you get by the idea of paying the electric bill? Spending can be every bit as boring as saving. It is the nature of the item to which the spending (or saving) is directed that makes the difference.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #12 — Luxury Spending Is Passion Spending
It’s when we buy things that we don’t really need (vacations, computers, sun rooms, sports cars) that spending becomes exciting. Seeing this helps you to understand why Passion Saving works and Sacrifice Saving does not. Saving on a need (to finance an old-age retirement) is boring. Saving for a more free life in the years before you turn 65 is exciting.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #13 — Saving: New and Improved!
Spending and saving are alternative money choices. The appeal of spending grows greater every year as new and exciting products and services are brought to market. Saving doesn’t stand much of a chance for those seeking to attain the same boring saving goal (the financing of an old-age retirement) as did their parents and grandparents.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #14 — Where Have All the Productivity Dollars Gone?
Many see an age-65 retirement as out of reach. Many others are pursuing plans to retire in their 40s or 50s. Something’s up. What’s up is that increases in productivity have opened up amazing opportunities to middle-class workers but these opportunities have been frittered away as the result of our failure to develop Life Plans. Good things happen to those who plan for them.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #15 — Money Is Time
Our bosses put it the other way. They tell us that to waste time is to waste money. When we go home, we need to keep in mind that the opposite is just as so. You trade control over the hours of your day to an employer to earn the money you need to live. Waste that money and you require yourself to give up control of more of those hours than otherwise would have been necessary. Not good.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #16 — A Thinking Person’s Lottery Ticket
What would you do if you won the lottery? Would you really spend the money on luxury purchases? Or would you use the financial freedom obtained to do different things with your life? Effective money management permits you to call the shots in your life years sooner than would otherwise be possible.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #17 — The Budget That Learned to Say “Yes!”
Think of your budget as a friend that opens up opportunities for you to do the things you want to do instead of as a schoolmarm shaking her finger in your nose and you’ll stop hating the idea of keeping a budget so much.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #18 — From the Clark Kent of Money Management into the Superman of Saving
Those who become motivated to save don’t increase their saving rates a small bit. They increase them dramatically.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #19 — What If You’re Married to a Job You Don’t Really Love?
Sometimes it makes sense to stick to a boring job. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Rob Bennett’s Favorite Saving Advice Sayings #20 — Death is Real
We all get only so many years. We have to get up and make our lives shine and it takes money to do it. That’s the true reason why you want to save effectively. You want to practice good money management because the sand is slipping through the hourglass.