One of the easiest ways to save more money is to keep living your life in the exact same way. Most of us have careers and that usually means annual increments and an occasional promotion that comes with a nice bump in salary. Unfortunately what usually happens is, once we get a higher salary, we want to think our lives are improving, so we decide to spend more money to make that a reality. What we don't realise is, by spending more money, we might be making our current lives temporarily better, but we are making our long term lives worse financially. So we essentially offset the benefits of a raise by increasing our cost of living and end up back in square 1. 

So the next time you get a raise, continue to live your life as if it never happened. You savings amount just went up by the full amount of your raise. 

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Why this works

Humans like growth and hate moving backwards. Asking people to reduce spending is extremely painful as it entails giving up somethings that we believed we could afford. It makes it feel like we are going backwards. It is much easier to keep spending what we have been spending, just not spending more when an increased or new income source comes into the picture. 

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​How-to guide

The next time you receive a raise, go to your standing instruction that you previously setup to pay yourself first and increase the amount of monthly transfer by the amount of your raise. Forget that you ever got a raise, keep living the same standard of living as you currently are. If you are having trouble doing that, maybe this blog post on happiness might help. 

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