Hellobee Boards

We do a set amount each month. Like you, each time a bill gets lowered (i.e. Daycare cost went down as he got older) I increase that difference to go into the savings account. It works well bc we never see it!

I have a set amount each paycheck. For my husband that means monthly since he's paid once a month, for me that means twice a month since I'm paid bi-monthly. It all goes into the same savings account.

We have set amounts deposited into a few accounts - RRSPs, what we call the "vacation fund", and what we still call the IVF fund even though we're done with IVF.

We don't do anything automatically. Once a month we take a look at how much "extra" money we have and we dump it all into savings. The amount varies, but is usually at least 1/4 of our combined monthly income.

We do have automatic transfers to RRSP's though. I think mine is set to 9% of my paycheck - it's taken right off my paycheck so I don't miss it. DH has an automatic transfer from his chequing for his RRSPs.

Currently we do a large lump sum at the end of the month. But like you said, sometimes things get tight and we just end up canceling that transaction. I would like to split it to maybe 2 transactions. One right with payday and just a set base amount that I know we should be able to cover each month and then a second one towards the end of the month that we can adjust based on how well we did saving/spending that month.

I just have a percentage of my automatic deposits go into savings. Some months I have to transfer out of savings to pay the bills, but for the most part, it keeps me from overspending.

I get paid weekly.

I have a small amount ($15) that gets transferred via direct deposit each week into a savings account at a credit union that I've been doing for years -this is turning into our vacation and/or gift fund.

Then we do a bigger weekly contribution to our high yield savings account. I keep trying to up the amount but then we have been spending too much money So doing a no-spending march challenge and that will hopefully but us in a good spot to increase it. If I don't put the money in savings we will spend it so it doesn't work for me to do a lump sum at the end of the month.

We have it set up so that after each transaction, $1 gets added to our savings. Then I transfer more over as it becomes available. It's not a ton but it does add up!

Set amount every month

We divide up every paycheck. We have an "essential" checking, a "fun" checking, "vacation savings, and "emergency/big puchase" savings. Makes it easy.

@Bao: @BelugaBean: Bank of America has a similar thing called "Keep the Change". It rounds up your transactions to a full dollar and the extra goes into your savings account. So if I buy lunch for $8.67, it puts $0.33 in my savings account.

I do a combination of several things - a set amount direct from my paycheck, monthly transfers to my IRA/investment accounts and LOs' savings accounts, and the keep the change feature with my bank.

I do $250 a month on the 15th. Most of our bills get paid out on the 1st so my paycheck at the end of the month is used for that.

I do a cascading automatic savings every week. For each week in the year, I transfer an amount, starting with 52 in January, and ending with 1 at the end of December, then start all over again. Some people do it the other way (starting with 1 and ending with 52), but because December is such a heavy spending month (Christmas and LO's birthday), I do the reverse. We used to automatically dump one of my paychecks in savings, but with kids, that doesn't happen anymore!

We both do an automatic $25 per month to each savings accounts and another $25 per month to each 529 account for the kids. I never miss the money because we've been doing it for so long. It's not much, but it adds up in the long run.

I have an automatic transfer set up for every 2 weeks. I'm happy with it!

We auto transfer a set amount into our baby's savings account monthly.

I have it set to deposit $40 into savings every Friday, which amounts to about $2000/year. We're working on building it back up, as it took a big hit (like, down to 0, lol) when we bought our house earlier this year. I also have the same Way2Save setup as @BelugaBean: where $1 is transferred each time there is a debit transaction. Small enough that it isn't noticeable, but adds up over time! I also have a cash rewards credit card through Wells Fargo, and when the balance hits $25 it auto-deposits into savings as well.

We are not great at saving, and the next thing we need to tackle is building an emergency fund. It makes me nervous that our savings can only cover 1.5 months of mortgage payments!!

@Bao: It's not harsh, that's basically what we do. Dave Ramsey has you keep a baby emergency fund of $1,000 before you start throwing all your extra money at your debt but we have more like $2,000 since that's what a common but major car or home repair would cost. We put most of our excess funds to debt (like way above our minimum payments) so if we had a sudden expense we could probably handle it. We bought a house while still in debt, which is a Dave no-no, but our rent was going to be higher than our mortgage and we would get a tax deduction so we went for it. We also don't totally follow Dave's plan in terms of retirement - he would have you put in minimal contributions until you are debt free but we were paying so much in taxes our accountant was losing his mind. So in addition to the house we we max out our retirement to bring down our taxable income. Our strategy sounds nuts to most people, (including our accountant) BUT we paid off my law school loans completely and have paid down 60% of DH's law school loans in the last 4 years and we feel that we will be able to amass a much more robust savings very quickly once out student loans are gone. Our goal is to be done in 3 more years.

@Bao: I totally admit it was easier going hardcore before we had DS. We lived in a cheap, dumpy rental, DH worked nutso hours, I had time to bargain shop and coupon for stuff, and I drove my tiny, beater 12 year old car everywhere. We were two attorneys living like we were flat broke (because technically we were). If we ran into some kind of money emergency, it would just inconvenience us, not a child.

After our son was born, obviously I had less time to meal plan and shop around, babies cost money, and I took a long unpaid maternity leave. And our old rental was just so cramped and crappy that we couldn't really make it a safe play environment for our son. So we bought a house (albeit its pretty modest and reasonable), our expenses increased for a while, and things had to ease up a bit on the debt payments.

BUT we also didn't give up on working on it completely because we figured it was better to get out of debt while our kids were younger when they wouldn't remember or care if we were being cheap about stuff. So after about 9 months, I think we were like okay, the baby is on a predictable schedule, we're moved into the new house, let's get back to business, and we buckled down again, even if it wasn't quite as severe as we were before kids.

If we didn't have such great healthcare coverage through my job or other large bills, perhaps we would have saved up a lot more in an emergency fund before doing the debt snowball, but yeah, you gotta find where you are comfortable. We decided for us the $1,000 emergency fund was too small because DH's old Jeep never had a repair under $1,000 when it needed something so we always kept $2,000. We got rid of the Jeep, but then had a house, so we were like yeah, if the fridge goes out or we have a plumbing emergency, we'll need about $2,000 to cover that.