Do you sometimes get stuck between wanting to enjoy your life because you only live once, and wanting to save and invest to enjoy a better future?

Most motivational speakers always pump us up with the idea of striving and working hard now so that we can enjoy the fruits of our hard work later. Those who have made it also emphasize that you need to put in your sweat and tears for you to be great in life.

We feel the pressure and sometimes we just try to enjoy it without feeling guilty, though it normally catches up with us when we desperately need the money. We crave stability or a balance between spending and saving. Sometimes we save, save and save and when we want to give ourselves a break, it’s like we have put holes in our pockets.

Firstly, we have to know our needs and wants and set some money for that every month. This allows us to enjoy our lives as much as we would like to save. Cutting yourself a slack is good since it doesn’t dry out everything that we enjoy and just leaves us all struggling and dry simply because we want to enjoy tomorrow. We deserve to enjoy today as much as we can prepare for tomorrow. We also need to remember that we should enjoy life or rather live within our means. Life is a process, not a destination.

Secondly, we can try to save a reasonable percentage of our income. Saving doesn’t necessarily mean that you should starve and save everything. We can check with our spending, income and see how much can we try to save. It can be 2% and we can add more as long as it doesn’t strain us.

When it comes to money, it’s mostly wise to write things down and later check for progress. We may need to budget our money, write down what we have spent and on what. This will even help us know what we spend money on last month and was it really necessary or not. Writing down your wants and needs and setting aside enough money for it (within our means) will allow us to know when we spent money on unnecessary things.

Lastly, with the saved money, we can try to invest our money in something that will bring returns. This will be possible if we remain consistent and keep saving in a way that will not affect our needs and wants. With investing, it will be like letting our money grow on its own. We may need to be careful in what we invest in.

With this, we can be able to enjoy our day-to-day life since we live only once and also be able to save for any rainy day in the future.