3 ways you can boost your savings

If you didn’t have a job when you were in high school or college, you probably found saving money to be a challenging task as you became an adult with a “real” job. When you’re young, it’s fun to spend money and retirement seems like a lifetime away. But as most veteran professionals know, the years can creep up on you fast. The last thing you want to do is find yourself trying to play catch up with your savings. Whether you haven’t been saving like you know you should or you’re just starting out in your first job after school, here are three easy tips from Capital One to boost your savings…

Automate: Set up an automatic savings plan to move money from your checking account to your savings on a regular basis. No matter how much or how little you can spare, every little bit helps. Most personal finance professionals recommend starting out by saving 10-20 percent of your net pay and increasing that number as you feel more comfortable.

Let direct deposit help: You can’t miss money that you never see. It can take a lot of discipline to move extra money from your checking to your savings, so why not let your direct deposit do the work for you? Let your employer know how much to put into your savings account each month, and once you’ve set it, you can forget it.

Change it up: There are a lot of options available these days that will put your change to work for you. Acorns is an app that rounds up your payments to the nearest dollar and puts that change to work for you. Just spent $28.54 at the grocery store? Acorn will then take $0.46 (to basically make your transaction $29) and use that money to invest in a portfolio of your choosing. Not a bad use of your spare change, eh?