As children we all of dreams of becoming a millionaire, no a billionaire, but as we get older, we seemingly forget the dream and slip into a routine in which we just get by in life.

Many will find themselves hit with the harsh reality that earning such an amount of money is not that easy, the dream job we wanted as kids to earn the amount of money did not pan out for us, but this does not mean at all that we should give up on out childhood dream.

The easiest way to earn a million dollars, despite what many might think, is to simply save.

You have to realize when I say that saving is the best way to earn a million dollars, but you have to remember that this will not happen overnight.

Saving a million dollars will require much of your life to get it done, no matter what type of savings account you have or interest rate you are given.

To help make saving easier you should go through your spending habits and run through what you can cut back on, and in turn put away in your savings account. You can also take an initiative to automatically place money into your savings account, which will only help make saving even easier as you will not have to worry about moving the money into the account yourself, hence allowing you to barely notice the amount of money gone from your account.

If you have already set up a budget for yourself, consider taking the excess money that that you do not spend within your budget to place into the savings account.

You have to start saving at an early age, which will allow you to begin spending your money earlier once you become a millionaire.

Now there are always other options to becoming a millionaire, the one that is sought out by most involves the lottery, but that is something that you will find at an early age is next to impossible,

A problem you will tend to find with saving is that unless you have a specific goal in mind, then saving can be quite difficult.

Saving without a purpose can make the entire process of saving much more difficult than it really is. When you think about it, saving just requires you to spend a little less and put away some of your unused money into a separate account.

What make that so difficult? The reason it becomes difficult is that we tend to find ways to spend our money when we have no goal in mind. You might just walk by a store and something will catch your attention and if you know you have the money to spend, then chances are you will not hesitate to purchase the item.

With a goal you will be able to keep on track with your plan to save and when the time comes you can do what you intended to do with the money you have spend saving.

What some people come to find when they reach their goal is that they have saved quite a bit of money and do not wish to see it go right away; instead they might want to start saving some more for an even bigger goal. There is no problem with this option as well but do remember that you will never be able to enjoy what you have earned if it just sits in a savings account.

If you do want to save for a long term reason, consider opening an RRSP if you haven’t already and save until your retirement. Once you retire, hopefully you will have enough money to sit back and enjoy the days ahead without worrying about your finances.

As of Today, Saving for Serenity is under the control and management of WebStar Content, a website management and content development company. Saving for Serenity has established itself as a source for Personal Finance information in the online world. We plan on re-establishing the glory days of Saving for Serenity, we plan on rebuilding the website to become a formidable financial website.

Saving for Serenity will also play a critical role in BankNerd.ca, a Canadian banking and financial website. Saving for Serenity will now be the exclusive content provider to banknerd.ca’s personal finance category.

We plan on providing content to the site but we need your help. We want to know what you want to see more off, we want to have your input. We want this website to be for the community by the community. Any suggestions or concerns you might have are appreciated.

When you want to save, you have to ensure that you are dedicated to the task. There are no shortcuts to saving; it will take time and dedication on your part in order to reach any goals you may have set.

To help keep you on the path of saving you need to stick with any budget that you set for yourself. Whether or not you keep to your budget will require a lot of effort on your part, however if you take the necessary steps you will find yourself easily saving towards your goals.

Creating a budget is essential to this entire process. As such you will want to keep in mind a few points when making your budget.

Your budget does not have to be the bare minimum to survive. Rather it should be taking into consideration your lifestyle and what you can afford to do each month, which includes a few luxuries here and there.

When you do create your budget, be sure to include money for the necessities first. This includes how much you will be putting away into your savings account each month, what you need to pay your bills and money for any entertainment expenses.

At the end of the day, by following your budget you will be able to save without the stress, and if you happen to stray off the path of your budget, you will be able to get back on track once you begin to follow your budget again.

One of problems we all face with our banking is that we tend to get charged a bunch of bank fees we can actually avoid.

I for one deal with this problem myself, which is paying to use an ATM which does not belong to my bank. We get charged a fee to withdraw the money from the ATM, but for the sake of convenience we do it anyways. 

We can easily avoid doing this by withdrawing any money we need before we head out for a night of fun, which will save us more money than you realize.

Another problem we face is that we have a bank account that we only use half of the feature for. You should examine your bank account and decide whether there are features just wasting away, and what your other options. Chances are you will be able to find a more suitable bank account, in which you will use all of the features and will not be wasting any money in the process.

In order to have the peace of mind when saving money or with anything to do with our finances, we have to take the time to thoroughly examine our options and come to the conclusion as to what suits us best.

Make the effort today and you will be able to rest easy tomorrow.

We all know that money can’t buy happiness. But does that mean that money and happiness are not interconnected? Far from it. The lack of money, or financially caused stress, can be a primary factor in the loss of happiness. Does that mean that you can buy peace and well being? No. But it does mean that in order to be happy, you need to have your finances under control.

In October of 2008, About.com reported:

• Financial stress is a sadly widespread experience. According to apoll on this site, roughly 7 in 10 respondents are “very stressed” about money, and only 1 in 10 report that they are not stressed about finances — and the proportion of people stressed about money is only going up.

In addition, the article goes on to explain that financial stress then impacts numerous other areas of your life, including sleep and health issues. Do you overeat? Perhaps it is because you are financially stressed. Do you have trouble sleeping? Maybe you need to get your finances under control. Do you find yourself angry, sad, or depressed? Have you considered it may be financial stress causing you this unnecessary harm?

It is time to stop being stressed about your finances.

Make More Money

How are you going to stop worrying about your financial problems? Just make some more money. All you need to do is make a few more dollars here and there, and then you’ll be fine, right? Most of us are operating on a pretty tight budget. So we figure that if we just make another $500 a month, we’ll have tons of room to feel less stressed.

Here’s the problem with that solution. Making more money means more work. Sure you can try to work smarter, or work for a greater wage, but in the end, if you want to make more money, you need to expend more energy. You need to put in overtime hours, you need to get a part time job, or you need to start freelancing on the side. And you know what, if you’re drowning in debt, this might not even be an option. You have to. But the more time you spend working, and the less time you spend with your family, friends, and yourself, the more stressed your going to be. You can’t outwork your financial stress.

A second problem. Between lifestyle inflation and the need to “reward” yourself for working so hard, the extra money you make will probably just disappear. If you spend less time with your spouse because you’re working extra hours, you may have to spend some of that money making it up to them. If you are suddenly not seeing your kids very often, they might “deserve” a few more presents here and there. And if you’re making an extra thousand dollars every month, then you can afford that new house/car/yacht that you’ve always wanted – which will reduce your stress levels on its own, right?

Micromanage Every Dollar

Ok, so maybe you can’t outwork your financial stress. You just need to be smarter about your money. So instead of making more money, you’re going to maximize your dollar. You sit down and work up a budget, a spending plan, and set goals for yourself. You watch your grocery shopping like a hawk, you coupon clip like a madman, and you choke the life out of your TV, internet, and cell phone bills. You negotiate your credit card interest rates down, you get a rent reduction and you limit yourself to one Popsicle every six weeks. You manage to make some breathing room in your budget – but all of a sudden, you realize that you’ve actually been choking yourself.

While there is a huge benefit to trimming the excess fat of your monthly expenses, you can’t out frugal your way out of stress either. Restricting yourself to the tiniest of pleasures and eliminating any expense other than the absolutely necessary will slowly clamp down on you living your life as you mean to enjoy it. Not only that, but micromanaging your money takes up a lot of time. Time you could be spending watching a movie, relaxing with you kids, or pursuing your passions. Time that you shouldn’t be wasting balancing checkbooks and logging receipts.

Life is meant for living, and life is meant for enjoying, and if you are so worried about every dollar that you spend that you are paralyzed, then something needs to change.

So what’s the solution? What’s the way out?

Embrace Serenity

Serenity is a simple word that is defined as “the absence of mental stress or anxiety”. Imagine, being free from stress. Being free from anxiety. Being free from the financial strain that is currently your life. The good news is that this is not a get rich quick scheme. Even better, you can have it today.

How so?

Take these simple steps

Stop

Right now, just stop. Take a minute and stop. Stop checking your bank account balance, stop counting your change, stop rifling through your bills, receipts, and coupons. Just stop.

Stopping will do two things. It will slow everything down for you. Life in our North American consumer society is going so fast that everything has become a blur. The corporations want it to become a blur so that they can profit on your disorientation. So just stop. Nothing will fall, nothing will break, no disaster will come of you taking a break. So stop already. Stop searching for quick money, stop looking for the lottery, stop wondering when you will be able to live the life you always dreamed of. Stop.

Stopping will also allow you the time to focus. Stop doing what others tell you to, and think about what you really want to do. What do you want to do with your life? Who do you want to be? How are you going to get there? What do you need in life? What are the essentials? What can do you without?

Breathe

Take a breath. Breathe. Air in, air out, and repeat.

Take a few minutes to really concentrate on what you need. Food, shelter, clothes. Friends, family, love. Establish a bare minimum. The house you’re living in – could you be content with less? The restaurants you eat out at – could you go less often? What’s your absolute minimum? Does it depress you? Probably. My bare minimum depresses me.

So what do you need to be happy. Really and trully happy. A bigger house? No chance. While it might increase your happiness temporarily, you will grow into it and will return to the same level of happiness as before. More money? Doubtful. The more money you have, the more stress it puts on you. Losing $10 sucks, losing $100 is worse, losing $10,000 or $10 million could cost you your life. The more you have, the more you can lose, the more stress and strain is on you. So what do you want? A fulfilling job? A short commute? A close group of friends? How much money could that really cost? You might already have enough.

So breathe. Because your financial situation – as bad as it may seem, or feel, or look – isn’t as bad as you think it is. Everything is possible to overcome. So breathe.

Plan

Now you know what you want. You just have to figure out how to get it. Want an emergency fund? No problem. Want to be able to retire? Piece of cake. Every problem has a solution, it just needs a plan on how to get there. A word of warning, however. You can’t plan your way to fame. You can’t plan your way to unbelievable riches. That’s okay though, because that’s not what Serenity is about. Serenity is not on the front page of newspapers, and Serenity is not the most well known person on your block. Serenity is quiet, calm, and peaceful – and very rarely seen.

So plan to achieve Serenity by taking your large goal and breaking it into a number of smaller goals. Want to retire in 20 years? Break that down into 5 year chunks, 1 year chunks, and 1 month chunks. How much should you put aside this week in order to retire in 20 years?

Automate

Then set it and forget it. If you have your online bank account all you have to do is set up your online account to pull a set amount of money each week, or each paycheck, or each month, from your regular account into the online account.

And then, you’re done. Relax. Share a pint with some friends. In 20 years you can retire, so you don’t have to worry about it anymore. For each goal or dream of passion you have, just repeat the process. Stop. Breathe. Plan. Automate.

Have too many goals and not enough money? Prioritize. Pick which one (or ones) is the most important to you, and get rid of the rest. You don’t need a new house, new car, new shoes, new friends, a vacation every year all while working 4 hours a week as an artist in your New Year Penthouse studio. You don’t. That won’t make you happy, you know it and I know it.

Getting married is a strange experience. It is one of those things you have no way of knowing or understanding until you’re doing it, and once its over, whatever you learned is likely (and hopefully) never going to be used again. One of the weirdest phenomenon is the experience of time.

My wife (!) and I got engaged in January. We decided to get married in August. That was a full 7 months away. We started off by planning some of the bigger things, getting ideas for themes, prices, and whatnot, but then life got busy and wedding planning stopped being as important. After all, we have 7 months. Well, soon enough, we were two weeks out from the wedding, and now all of a sudden, it’s been two and half weeks since we got married. Time shot by in a flash.

The last two weeks before the wedding were insanely busy. Every night after work, we would be scheming, planning, plotting, calling, arranging, picking up, and paying for things. It was crazy. At that point, you have so little time, that when there became a choice between something that was fast, or something that was less expensive, we would always choose the faster option.

For the most part, we simply ran out of time to feed ourselves. Beside the fact that we had so little energy that the thought of cooking made our stomaches turn, we just didn’t have the time to plan, prepare, and cook dinner. It just wasn’t happening. Or, if we were out shopping and it came close to a meal time, we would eat out so that we would be able to finish the shopping. It had to get done, so we did it.

While I don’t like spending money that doesn’t need to be spent, in this case, I think that the cost is justified. Sometimes, we run into life’s situations where cost doesn’t matter – but time does. So you pay a premium in order to enjoy food quickly, without having to make it yourself. There are tons of situations where one would trade money for time.

When do you trade your money for time? When do you regret it?

Well, it’s been a heck of a couple of weeks. On August 9th, I got married! Yay! It was a little touch and go for a while with the weather, but it stopped raining a few minutes before the ceremony, and the sun came out for the reception. It was perfect! My wife (!) and I then traveled to Hawaii for our honeymoon, had a great time there, and then came home and lay around for a few days before we had to return to work.

Yesterday, our last day of our honeymoon, we decided to go to IKEA to start spending some of the wedding money that we had received. We needed a few things, like a bed and matress, so we ended up spending quite a bit of money. What shocks me the most is how easy it has become to spend money.

When you’re planning a wedding, you end up dealing with a lot of cash. Between money that we saved, and money that was given to us for the wedding, we ended up dropping quite a bit of cash on various things. Numbers that used to seem big no longer seem quite so large when you’re spending them on a regular basis. In addition, the last few weeks of wedding planning are rife with purchases. You need a few more napkins, or you found a better tie for the best man (btw, I need that tie back Jeff), and you’re so tired of comparison shopping (or just shopping in general) so you just get it.

Then the wedding day happens, and suddenly nothing matters anymore. Everything works out, and you spend two weeks in honeymoon mode, where you’re not worried about the bills from the wedding or whether or not you came in on budget, or if you saved up enough money to spend on the honeymoon. You just go, and do, and know that this is the only time in your life where you’ll be able to do this, so you relax, and enjoy not keeping track of money.

But then you come home. Thankfully, I believe my wife and I managed to keep our wedding (and our honeymoon) under budget. We managed to save up enough, plan smart enough, and shop clever enough to fully enjoy our wedding and honeymoon without breaking the bank. Yay us!

The only problem is: we still have the mindset. We’re still in shopping mode. We’re still in the mentality of scouring for deals, and not caring how much things cost – just wanting to get it done. So then it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that when we walk into IKEA with a bunch of wedding money, we walk out with a bunch of stuff.

I think we made good decisions on what to buy. We got a lot of what we needed for the price that we paid, and it should work out perfectly for our needs. Sadly, we’re not done yet, and we still have a bunch of shopping to do. I just don’t like the fact that we’re continually stuck into this “shopping mode”, this mindset of consumerism. I don’t know how or when we’re going to get out.

When it comes to saving, I find it to be one of the most difficult tasks, no matter what age you are, or what you are saving for.

If you think about it, saving requires much discipline, you are have to put away a portion of your money, and manage to make it to the end of the month without touching it.

What no one can deny is that the moment you have reached your saving goal, the feeling is one of the best in the world.

For me, I recently decided to save for a watch, a Raymond Weil to be precise. I find their watches to be fantastic, and fell in love with their Freelancer Models. Just today I reached the halfway mark for my savings goal. Just looking at my bank account with the money sitting there was getting me excited for the moment I can go out and purchase the watch.

Now some people might ask why not just purchase the watch on credit and pay it back monthly? The answer is easy, I do not wish to purchase something I cannot afford, and paying off my credit card with such a purchase would only put me in a position where I am paying off interest as well. Which as you know makes the purchase cost even more.

I am all for purchasing on my credit card to earn the reward points, and paying it off immediately, but of course that does require me to save the money first.

Remember, setting a goal is essential for anyone who is savings. Without stating the obvious, you will definitely be able to enjoy your money more if you have something you want to spend it on aside from daily expenses.

Recently an interesting website came to my attention, Accounting Degree.com; in this site there are various articles posted concerning accounting degrees, however one of the most recent posts is quite amazing.

The title of this post if 100 Important Personal Finance Posts for Women, and as the title describes, there are 100 posts within the article that can help you manage your personal finances.

The author went through each blog post and has gone to categorizing them from Relationships and Marriage, Getting out of Debt even Frugality. The author also went to even greater lengths by having a short description of what each blog post entails. By doing this you have an introduction of what the postis about and you can make a decision as to go to read the actual blog post.

I cannot begin to describe how great it is to have all this information in one location.

I myself have only begin to scratch the surface of these 100 posts, but let me tell you the posts are informative and get to the point, which allows you to learn the lesson well.

I hope you can take the time to have a look at it, and if you do not have time to go through them all, at least examine the sections and review what posts might be able to help you in your finances.

Personally, I had a look the Investing Section, post number 84. How to Invest in the Stock Market via Stocks, ETFs and Mutual Funds. It was a great piece for a beginner like me looking to get into investing. I still have a long way to go before I jump in but this post was quite helpful.

When you have some time, head over to the 100 Important Personal Finance Posts for Women article, and you will be surprised with the quantity of information at your disposal.