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Can You Save Two Dollars A Day?

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In my personal blog Palaguin Ang Pera Mo (Make Your Money Grow), I uploaded a post titled Can You Save 50 Pesos a Day? At the time of writing, fifty pesos is a little over a dollar. For a minimum wage earner in the Philippines 50 is about 20% his daily wage already or at least 10% for those living in a first class city. However, though the minimum wage in a first class city is more or less twice as much compared to the provinces, the cost of living in the first class cities is at least three times more.

While I’m not sure how much is the minimum wage in the U. S., but I believe it is more than two dollars an hour. Way much more if my assumption is correct.

Let’s just say, you are earning Five Dollars an hour and you are working for  8 hours a day. Which means you are earning 40 Dollars a day.  Let’s again assume  that you work only for 5 days a week. That’s 800 Dollars a month. Thus on a daily basis you get a little less than 30 Dollars a day (I divided 800 by 30). Question is, regardless of your daily expenses can you set a side two dollars a day?

For those who can easily set aside two dollars a day, can you set aside 20% of your daily wage everyday?

Personal Sharing

Let me share to you what I am doing.

I am am a freelancer. I have no fixed income except for the 80 dollars a month salary for teaching part-time (8 hours a week). Can I still save? I admit it is quite a big challenge having no fixed monthly income, but I have been saving 50 Pesos (or one dollar) a day for months. There are days that would miss it, but I always try to make up for those days.

Benefits of Saving Daily

There are some benefits in saving this amount daily;

  1. Developing a savings habit. Yes, by putting aside a certain amount everyday, it becomes a habit.
  2. Living below my means. There are times I want to indulge myself and buy something I want. But since I don’t have my money in my wallet, I wasn’t able to buy those things. By the time I got home, I would realize, I don’t really need it. But if there’s something that I would really want to buy for myself, (I still have to reward myself from time to time), I would….
  3. Strive to Earn more. Yup, living below my means, forces me to look for other source of income. The thrive more.
  4. Having an Emergency Fund. For the month was a great struggle for me financially. My other source of income has been delayed for over two months, I had few clients and no new projects. I have just invested part of my savings in a VUL policy (it’s an investment plan with insurance), and mostly in my brother’s sand and gravel business. Of course I still make it  a habit to have some cash stashed. So for the past couple of months, I still have some cash available even though i have almost no income. And whenever I got paid, no matter how small, I always make it a point to put some amount back into my savings.

Challenge

So here’s my challenge for you (and me)…  Save TWO Dollars a day, or at least TEN PERCENT of your daily income everyday.

Can you do it? Yes you can. 🙂

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Written by artbytes26

I'm a self-taught photographer and artist, hobbyist, nature lover, photo editor. and a self trained web designer and developer.

16 Comments

  1. You have to take in your income that you get on a regular basis. then you need to take in your expenses that you must pay, roof over your head, rent or rates if you own the place, mortgage if you are paying it, insurance, power and telephone use and internet connection, plus the basic food bill and unexpected expenses such as doctor, dentist or car expense, petrol, registration.
    Then when you have taken in account your expenses, you can find if you have anything left over to save.
    Good post, many people pay more than what they can afford.

  5. It is really hard to save money when there are someone who rely on you, just my point of view. Emergency fund is my target but still, nothing happens yet.

  7. Around me, I see people saving less and less and spending a lot of money, eating out, buying new phones, clothes and accessories. Saving money is very important.

    • I guess many of us are struggling financially, in one way or another. I’m not a financial expert but I want to share what helped me and could help others too. 🙂