Savings Plan

As promised in my last post, here is my discussion of savings plans. Pretty much anywhere you read about personal finance, you will see that people recommend breaking goals into short-term (less than five years) or long-term (more than five years). Some also break into medium-term goals (5-10 years), but I think it can sometimes be tricky distinguishing between medium and long when they're both so far away.

As I mentioned before, I love love love spreadsheets. While my budgeting spreadsheet is pretty robust (a different tab for each month, and a different workbook for each year), my savings spreadsheet even makes me laugh at its depth. My goals and savings workbook has eleven tabs in it--eleven! It's actually pretty ridiculous. Each tab has a different variation--what if I saved this much, this month, when would I meet my goal? Or it goes into detail about a specific goal, like paying for graduate school or buying clothes.

My final savings spreadsheet looks like this (with dates and numbers thrown in; not my actual spreadsheet. It's way too big). Also, note, in my spreadsheets, I put the total highlighted in bright yellow so I know that I've completed saving for that goal. 

Dog	Travel	Graduate School	Month
50		350	January 2014
50		350	February
50		350	March
50		350	April
200	50	350	May
	50	350	June
	50	350	July
	50	350	August
	200	350	September
		350	October
		350	November
		3850	December

This just shows how I break everything out. When I was getting ready to buy a dog, I saved up money for a year to make sure I had enough to pay for him, all his vet bills the first year of his life, and any toys or supplies he needs. That way, when I picked him up, all I had to worry about was "omg, I have a puppy now!" and all the fun/stress/tears that involves.

The same goes for graduate school. I have always had a paranoia of becoming poor. Whenever my parents mentioned anything about money, I would pipe up "are we going to lose our house?!" Not that my questions had any basis in reality, but for some reason, I was always scared of not having enough money to get by. So fast-forward to now, at 24, living on my own and making ends meet. I still have that fear except now my big fear is going into debt. I never want to go into debt except for a house mortgage, and maybe a car, but even that I would like to avoid. So, to make going into debt not happen, I have to plan my money very carefully because I have many lofty financial goals and don't have a massive income.

I finished saving for Pinecone (my sweet, goldendoodle. He's almost a year and a half now!), I've saved up enough for travel for now, and I have my emergency savings all squared away (though, some days I think I should have more in my emergency account and then I think about all I want to save for fun, and I just can't do it). So for graduate school, since I don't want to dip into my savings or go into debt, I put a little bit away each month into a separate account so that when my graduate tuition bills come, I can pay for them immediately. This takes a lot of discipline though because sometimes I really just want to go out and buy some new clothes (my closet is finally tipping from mostly high school to mostly college and beyond--woohoo! Wardrobe is finally growing up...).

Speaking of clothes, I also have a 'clothes' tab in my "Savings Plan" spreadsheet. In it, I have what clothes I would like to buy (all color-coordinated so I can do a lot of mix-and-matching instead of buying a ton of stuff and having nothing to wear it with), how much they will likely cost, and when I can afford to buy them. Since most of my money is going toward graduate school right now, it will be a long-process updating my wardrobe. My next big purchase will be jeans since I know I desperately need a pair--seriously, my other two jeans (yes, only two) are wearing very thin. I'm wanting to buy more quality jeans so I've been looking at Lucky Brand which is much more pricey than my usual Kohls jeans, but will a) probably look nicer for casual Fridays at work and b) will probably last longer. For my new wardrobe, I'm looking for more quality over quantity.

Other big parts of my savings plan include a house, a car, and a wedding. All of these things are ridiculously expensive. But by breaking them out into manageable chunks, I'm able to see when I'm likely to reach those goals. These are the long-term goals I mentioned at the beginning of the post--things that I will (hopefully) need 5-10 years down the road, not now (again, too expensive!). I've already started researching what type of car I'd like (hoping hoping hoping my current car lasts at least another six years) so that I'm prepared for what I need to save so that when my car does die (again, hopefully many years down the road), I'm prepared to buy a new one.

Anyway, that's my way of creating savings plans. It may seem tedious and silly, but it really keeps me on track to reach my savings goals and allows me to do the things I want to do. I highly recommend spreadsheets to help get your finances on track, or really, anything on track! Spreadsheets are amazing.