December is a dreaded month for many with all the expenses expected to come. Suddenly it feels like we know tons of people and family just keeps multiplying with siblings and cousins having kids. We hear more and more grown-ups saying that “This year we will not buy any Christmas gifts, only for the kids.” In the end we tend to buy just one small gift anyway, and we do this because there is something more to Christmas than just spending money, there is something beautiful of giving a gift to someone you care about, to see their excitement and to be able to be the reason to put a smile on their face on that day. Personally I love gift giving and I’m a strong believer that Christmas doesn’t have to be expensive.

We can talk about saving all we want but talking certainly won’t make any change, it is time to do something about it! We have reached level three in the aggressive and meanwhile level one and level two focused understanding our potential to save and becoming more aware on what we spend our money on and what we want to spend our money on, level three is about taking action.

We have reached mid-September and it’s time to step up our savings game. In the first week we explored different types of expenses that we have, necessity, want and waste and this week we are going to take a closer look at the want. Before we do that, let’s quickly recap from the first level. We started with understanding the concept of our potential to save. Our maximum potential means that we are only spending on necessities, expenses needed for us to survive. This might result in a lot of money in our bank but it’s not necessarily the optimal way of living our life. Expenses within the category need, investments that gives added value to our life also increases our life quality and a certain amount of want is worth more than the money we would save. To live a good life we need to find the right balance between saving and investing in wants, to find this balance it is great to experiment with the level of savings on the scale of your potential.

If there is a time of the year when you should spend and enjoy it is summer. It is not an excuse to waste money but it is a good time to do what we really enjoy in life. It will of course drain our savings a bit and to make sure that we don’t have to worry about it we first need to fill up our savings to be prepared. The summer season is about to end and we have all the time ahead of us to prepare for next years round of summer spending. Therefore, we are going to focus on an aggressive savings training this month on #FFF which potentially could change your perspective of saving for the time to come. Through different steps each week you can gradually increase your savings intensity to finally reach your full potential.