Target the youth, pleads a 26-year-old Fin24 user who says reaching developing minds could be the way to foster a culture of saving.
I am a 26-year-old and I have been earning an income for approximately 5 years now. The disappointing thing, to me, is that it took me 4 of those 5 years to get to a point where I started saving albeit on a small scale.
During this Savings Month I have read several articles targeting, in my opinion, the South African adult population. While I endorse that action, I am a also a proponent of child education.
While in university I used to get an allowance from my parents and an income from my tutoring activities but I never saved and it was not because I did not have a sum to save. In retrospect, I spent my money unwisely because then I did not understand the importance of saving and, consequently, investigating how to save was not important to me.
It is because of this that I think targeting the working class is not enough. Target the people while they are still young. Get to them when their minds are still developing and hence more receptive to new/unfamiliar information. By doing so, it may foster a culture of saving.
Find yourself a goal
As for my personal experience with saving, these are the things I consider important:
1. The goal: before you can start saving, define a goal. Without a goal you do not have anything to work towards or to measure yourself against. Without a goal you can not plan. A goal can be as simple as I want to have Rxxx to my name in two years.
2. List all your sources of income. By doing so, you know exactly how much income is available to you to do with what you want to.
3. List all your expenses and if possible group them by nature (necessity versus luxury).
4. With the three components above, you can then attempt to answer the question: how do I achieve the goal?
From this point it became more technical for me, but the message I felt I needed to get across is that saving is not just for the adults.
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