How Do You Actually Start Saving Money?

It’s much easier than you think

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

How do you actually start saving money? I used to devour everything related to personal finance right after the 2008 crash — mostly because I was broke as a joke and there was nothing better to do. After taking a roughly 10-year break and coming back to this part of the internet, I found that a lot of blogs (and forum posts, and reddit communities) are mostly about folks with high salaries, or tax questions, or crypto-trading addictions. Things have changed a lot…

(This is a bit of a tangent, but I attribute that to the ridiculously long bull market of the 2010s, when the rich got richer and the middle class got rich. The same people that used to write about saving a few bucks on groceries are flipping houses now, and their audience has changed the same way.)

So… How do you actually start saving money? I don’t want my blog to become yet another depository of advice for the upper-middle class (“Make 1% weekly returns by selling covered calls — all you need is $10K!”), and unlike many bloggers, I actually started at the very bottom. I hope my advice will be actionable, or at least mildly useful.

First, there’s a big question about your monthly expenses: do you have barely enough, or do you have money left over after paying your bills, credit cards…