Automate Your Savings in 5 Simple Steps

With the pressure of bills and expenses, it’s easy to lose sight of your savings goals. Luckily, automated systems can help you save without even noticing. This post will walk you through five simple steps for automating your savings so you can start building your nest egg today!

Open a suitable account for an automated system

To automate your savings, you need to open an account that makes it convenient for you. You want an account with low fees, a low balance requirement and one that allows you to transfer money quickly. If you have an existing account, see if there’s anything else it can do for you. Companies like SoFi offer SoFi Money Vaults. As per their experts, “Vaults live underneath your Savings account. Use them to earmark money for goals, an emergency fund, or just a rainy day—while still earning the same interest rate on all your money.”

Make a payment to self

Making a payment to yourself is a surefire way to save money and ensure that you’ll actually be able to put some money away. Like the other steps, this starts with setting a goal. The next step is making it public so that other people can hold you accountable for your savings goals. The last step is making this recurring payment so that it isn’t too difficult for you to remember and/or forget about—if it’s too easy for you not to think about, then there’s no way that it will become part of your regular routine.

Set up payment for subscriptions and bills

The second step to automating your savings is setting up automatic payments. This can be for recurring bills like your rent or car payment or for non-recurring bills like utility bills. You can also set up automatic payments for subscriptions and other services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video.

Setting these up requires a couple of different steps. First, you’ll need to log in to the website of whatever company you’re paying for and find their settings page, where they allow you set up automatic payments from your bank account. Once there, enter in how much money should come out each month (or however often the bill comes) and then let them know which bank account it should go into!

Once this is done, don’t forget about it! The company will still send out statements every month, so it’s important not only that they know where the money should go but also when they’re supposed to get paid each time as well (otherwise, they might think something went wrong).

Automate your contribution toward savings

Set up an automatic monthly transfer from your checking account to the savings account. If you’re unsure how much to contribute, start small with $50 per month and increase it over time as you feel comfortable. The amount of money you can contribute is ultimately up to you, but make sure that you have enough money in your checking account to cover your expenses.*

Gradually increase your automated transfers

Gradually increase your automated transfers. The key here is gradual. You want to be sure not to increase the amount too quickly so that you don’t risk running into any unexpected expenses or emergencies. You also don’t want to increase it too much because you could easily find yourself accumulating more than you need and having trouble paying debts or funding other goals. Finally, you don’t want to decrease the amount at all—this will slow down your savings rate, which may make it harder for you in the long run!

If you’re looking for an easy way for automatic savings, this is it. No more late nights spent researching and comparing financial products. No more clipping coupons or cutting out ads for special deals on your dream vacation (or car).