The Hustle of Sistah Ant

I was paid on Thursday and I put all but a hundred dollars into the house fund.  It felt great!  After doing a few calculations, I see that if you add up my emergency fund, house fund, and retirement fund, I have over ten thousand dollars in assets that have nothing to do with the value of my car or other personal possessions.  That makes me happy.  I’ve never been able to save this much cash before.  I love the feeling of knowing that I have enough cash to get through months of unemployment if I need to, or to deal with an emergency if I have to.

I’d love to talk about the great things I did to get here at this point, but before I do, I have to point out that I got a big help when I was laid off and received my severance package - I saved the entire amount of my severance pay, which accounts for thousands of dollars of my savings.

But other than that, here are some factors that have helped me to increase my cash assets by over ten thousand dollars since I started this blog less than a year ago:

• I increased my income by getting certification in my field, which qualified me for higher-paid positions.
• I used payroll to make direct deposits of portions of my paycheck into my savings account.
• I signed up for my company’s 401K and later learned how to roll it over into an IRA when I was laid off to avoid bad tax consequences.  I’ve also been encouraged to save in my IRA for tax purposes, because it helps to decrease my tax liability.
• I did calculations with each check to allow for bills and living expenses so that I would know exactly how much I could afford to save - this way I could save that amount up front, instead of spending money without a plan and hoping there’d be money left over at the end of a pay period to save.
• I put unexpected windfalls directly into my savings.
• I set goals and visualize what I will do with the money, which helps me to save aggressively.
• As soon as I paid off my old credit card debt, I committed the payments I was making to pay off debt to my grow my savings.
• I put money into my "high" interest savings account as soon as I get it, which 1) gets the money out of my reach before I spend it away, and 2) increases the balance of my account, which affects how much I get a month in interest payments.
• I don’t spend the money I’ve saved, which used to be a big problem for me.  If I want something, I can save for it, use my credit and then repay it, or just not buy it.  The only thing that can persuade me to dip into the savings is a real emergency, or something that would jeopardize my credit rating (which, since I’m saving for a house, IS an emergency, of sorts).