Bank Accounts to Maximise Savings

One really useful way I have found to stop wasting money and maximising my savings is to organise my bank accounts for specific purposes.  The accounts I have are as follows:

1. Everyday Account
This is the account my pay goes into every fortnight.  It is purely the sorting centre for my money, and gets emptied after each pay is divided into its various destinations.  Having no balance in this account means that I have to manually transfer money back to it in order to use Paywave or EFTpos, which I am unlikely to do.

2. Bills Account
I am lucky enough that I can salary package a percentage of my pay against my mortgage, so I receive a tax free sum via the salary packaging company.  This money goes straight into my bills account and is enough to cover all of my regular bills which are either direct debited from this account or I direct BPay to take the money from this account.  I was previously transferring this money into my everyday account and wasting it on I don't even know what!

3. Pet Account
I have 2 dogs and 3 cats, so I have $60 automatically transferred into this account every pay so that I have enough money to pay for any vet bills (hopefully).

4. Christmas Account
This is a high interest account, where I am doing the 52 week saving challenge ($1 first week, $2 the next week, etc, until you end up with nearly $1400 by the end of the year).  I will use this money to buy all the birthday and Christmas gifts for my family and friends next year.

5. Offset Account
This is my main savings account, because it offsets my home loan 100%.  This means that I pay less interest and consequently I will pay off my mortgage earlier.  I also park any money in this account that is waiting to pay for groceries or anything else because as interest is calculated daily, every bit of extra money will help reduce interest.

Cash is King

The single most effective way I have found to save money is to switch from using my debit card to using cash and a simplified version of the famous envelope system. There is something about cold, hard cash that makes you think twice about handing it over. Here is my method:

1. Calculate an average weekly spend on groceries and fuel over the last 3-4 months

2. Withdraw this amount in cash each week - this is all that you have to spend on groceries and fuel for the week.  Whatever is left over is saved in an envelope.

3. Make it a game to try and save as much as possible each week by using coupons, rewards points, shopping the specials - any way to save that you can think of (some ideas for saving on shopping in posts to come)!

4.  When you save up $1000 in your envelope, take it to the bank and put it in a special savings account (I put mine in my mortgage offset account so that it is helping to pay off my house).  In 8 months I have saved $6000 in this way.

Wasteful to rich (er)

I'm 30-something,  earn a decent wage, and until this year, I was unable to save a single red cent.  Not knowing what I was doing with my money, I made a few simple changes and have saved $20 000 so far this year.  The one rule about my money saving campaign was that I was not allowed to lower my standard of living or miss out on anything I currently enjoyed in life in order to save money.  It was all about simply not wasting as much money.  I hope to share some of these easy money saving strategies in this blog so that other money wasters might be able to change some of their ways!