Are you at the start of your savings journey? Or maybe you’ve tried to build savings for a while but keep running into roadblocks? Regardless of your situation, Affinity wants to help you achieve your financial goals, so here are five ways to increase your savings.

1. Keep track of all spending … seriously, ALL spending

How much money do you actually spend? Monitoring all of your expenses can be an eye-opening experience. We’re talking about keeping track of every time you dine out (including tips), every trip to the grocery store, every subscription to a streaming service, and so on. To capture an accurate picture of your monthly spending, you can use your credit card and bank statements, as well as a spreadsheet or other tracking tool to include expenses paid for with cash.

Individually, each of these expenses seems small. But when you add them all up, you begin to see why saving can be such a challenge.

2. Cut your spending

After you have a clear picture of your expenses, you can take steps to cut those expenses:

• Instead of eating out three times a week, try eating out only two times a week.
• Instead of paying for five streaming services, pick your three favorites and cancel the other two.
• Buy more strategically – use coupons at grocery stores, use promo codes when shopping online, and learn the best time of the year to buy cars, TVs, furniture and more.

You can then put the money you save into your savings account. Over time, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much your savings will grow.

3. Set ambitious but realistic savings goals

A great saving strategy is to set goals, either short-term goals (car down payment, dream vacation, emergency fund, etc.) or long-term goals (house down payment, funding your retirement, etc.).

Once you set a goal, create a realistic estimate of how much money and how long it will take to reach your goal. Then, adjust your budget to make the estimate a reality. You can include a category in your budget for savings, just like you have categories for home, car, insurance, etc. You can start by saving an amount or percentage that feels comfortable. Over time, you may want to increase your savings to 15 to 20 percent of your income.

4. Set up automatic transfers

Rather than manually transferring money to your savings account, you could set up automatic transfers between your checking and savings accounts. As mentioned above, you could start with a modest percentage as you build your savings habits. Before you know it, you could become a super saver, setting yourself up for a strong financial future.

5. Set up split deposit

Split deposit is the direct deposit of an employee’s paycheck issued by their employer. However, instead of the entire deposit going into one account, a specific amount or percentage of the employee’s pay is deposited into separate savings or investment accounts. Learn more about split deposit.