Big Steps or Small Steps to Financial Stability?
If you’re interested in saving money or getting out of debt, then you’ve probably heard this advice a hundred times: “Skip your daily Starbucks coffee and you’ll save a heap of money per year”. It’s sound advice, but a recent discussion at The Simple Dollar questions whether we should be focusing on small steps like these or big steps like - as in their example - selling the jet ski we only use once a year - and probably saving more money than we would by foregoing the daily coffee at Starbucks.
But the summary of the discussion is this: the best way to personal financial stability is to take a combination of small steps and big steps. If you take a lot of small steps, like brown-bagging your lunch instead of buying out, skipping that coffee, and hiring DVDs instead of going out to the cinema, then they will add up to be the equivalent of some of the big steps. If, at the same time, you also take some big financial steps, like downsizing your home or surviving with one car instead of two, then you’ll be accumulating a whole lot more savings there.
In combination, not only will you learn to live more frugally, but you’ll be feeling more secure because you are likely to get out or remain out of debt, and to be able to save towards a your retirement, too.
This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 5:32 am and is filed under Saving Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
