The basic personal finance equation is simple:
Income – Expenses = What You Can Save or What You’re Losing Each Month
If you reliably earn more than you spend, you save money each month. If you get that money invested, your wealth will grow over time.
If you reliably spend more than you earn, on the other hand, you lose money each month and you’ll slowly end up deeper and deeper in debt.
In theory, it’s simple to get ahead. In practice, it’s tough.
The reason it’s so hard to get ahead financially isn’t because it’s complicated. It’s because the odds are stacked against you in a bunch of different ways.
If you don’t pay yourself first and automatically save a portion of each paycheck, you will naturally spend more money as you make more money.
One reason is that when you have more cash in your bank account, you’ll naturally feel less stressed and spend more freely. Sometimes this is called lifestyle inflation. As you make more money, you naturally feel more comfortable spending a bit more at the grocery store, and on your car payments, and on and on it goes.
A second reason is that things actually do cost more money every single year. Gas, groceries, hydro, and rent. Prices go up, and if your income doesn’t go up too, or if you don’t keep increasing how much you’re saving, you’ll slowly wind up farther and farther behind.
Another reason is that we tend to crave social status. If your money is just sitting in a bank account, how is anyone supposed to know you make a lot?
This impulse is what leads to overspending on fancier cars and trucks, bigger houses, boats, buying rounds at the bar. It’s all about signalling to people that you’re loaded. Most of the time this happens without you even thinking about it, and even worse, it often leads you to being less rich than your spending signals. It’s fun in the short term. Disastrous in the long run.
Another problem is that almost everyone is interested in you spending money. Businesses. Salespeople. Advertisers. We’re constantly bombarded by opportunities to spend our hard earned money and sooner or later we get worn down and give in. As you make more money, the asks get bigger and more frequent. Everyone wants a piece.
Even worse, even your bank is part of this game. Why do you think you keep getting those emails about increasing your credit limit? They want you to have a balance on your credit card, on your line of credit, to keep extending your mortgage. They want those interest payments to keep rolling in. That’s how they get paid.
And so we find ourselves in the unfortunate situation where our own psychology, our own bank, and almost every other part of society encourages us to spend more, even money we don’t have.
If you find yourself struggling to keep your expenses down and your savings up, even as you progress in your career and earn more each year, don’t beat yourself up. Getting your income to outpace your expenses is legitimately hard and almost no one is on your side.
Luckily, there are ways to stack the odds in your favour.
The first, as I mentioned briefly above, is to automatically take a portion of each of your paychecks and put it directly into a savings or investment account, like a TFSA. That way you never see the money and are never tempted to spend it. You take willpower and your psychology out of the equation entirely.
The second is to think long and hard about what you really want in life. What brings you joy and satisfaction. What your long term goals are and how much money you’ll need to save to make it happen. We naturally try to keep up with the Joneses and we end up buying things we don’t need to impress people we don’t even know. Playing status games can feel good in the moment, but most of the time, we do it without even being aware or without thinking about what it’s really costing us down the line.
And finally, the third thing you can do is hire a financial advisor. Yes, this is a shameless plug, but I got into this business specifically because I was so tired of having everyone working against me when it came to my finances, even my own bank. I get great joy from this job because I’m able to actually be in people’s corners and fight to help them get ahead and reach their goals. My primary aim is helping you grow wealthier over time, so I’m actually on your team. That makes a world of difference.
But honestly, even without me, you can do it. Start saving automatically. Every time you get a raise or a promotion or a better paying job, increase that amount. Don’t spend money just because you have it or to seem successful, and you’ll do okay.
In the end, it always comes back to the simple equation. The one thing all wealthy people have in common is that they reliably spend less than they earn.
Focus on increasing your rate of saving. The rest will take care of itself.