I Hate Saving Money

We’ve always been taught that saving money is this noble skill, the responsible thing to do — “put some away for a rainy day,” they say, “build your emergency fund,” and “think about your future.”

But something about that advice has always felt fundamentally wrong to me.

Budgeting vs Saving

The two often get lumped together as complementary skills.
Budgeting is essentially about discipline — organizing your income to carefully cover your expenses and live within your means.

So if that’s the case, and you’ve mastered the skill of budgeting, what exactly are you “saving” for?

People might argue it’s necessary for transitions between jobs, substantial life changes, emergencies, or just the odd sudden expense.

But let’s poke at that logic for a second: Is having just one month’s worth of savings genuinely helpful if you lose your job?

Job hunting rarely just takes a month, not to mention that if you’re planning on switching jobs, you should’ve already started while you are still employed.

Even if you land something new quickly, your entire lifestyle — expenses, commute, meals — might dramatically shift, forcing you to restructure your expenses and, in most cases, require an entire financial overhaul.

Which means that the initial, carefully calculated savings fund might become irrelevant overnight.

Then comes the argument of emergencies. But emergencies, by definition, can’t be fully planned for.

If you’ve encountered any sort of emergency before, you know exactly how much it cost you, so you can simply adjust your monthly budget accordingly.

Simply throwing extra money into an ambiguous pile labeled “emergencies” is far too vague and ineffective.

Realistically, suppose you wanted to account for life’s unpredictabilities. In that case, you should’ve started when you were born in attempts to mitigate life's unpredictable nature, and even then, it still wouldn’t have been enough.

A Better Way Than Saving

Saving without a specific purpose isn’t financial diligence; it's a vague form of anxiety in disguise.

A more practical and intentional approach might look a little something like:

Begin by intimately spending about a month to understand your finances in order to establish a baseline, or just simply an average that you can work off of.

From there, segment your income into multiple accounts each with its own designated purpose.

One for essentials, another for daily spending, and one specifically for irregular expenses or putting aside money for a particular thing.

The choice is entirely up to you how you want to split it. The idea is just to have different “baskets” to account for all areas of your life.

To each of the accounts, add just enough cushion to round up your budget to a near number that is barely noticeable, and never too much where it becomes stressful.

From that point, if six months pass and you haven’t touched that money, use it deliberately and spend it: upgrade your life, improve something tangible, then start fresh again.

The goal isn’t to just recklessly spend, nor is it anxious hoarding. It’s clarity and intention.

Finally — and most importantly — saving is entirely different from investing.

While saving in most cases can feel passive and unproductive, investing actively builds assets or generates streams of income. Investing means your money is working rather than idling.

If you thought this article was helpful, let me know what you think. I’ve got some more articles on the way that will cover some of the topics we touched on, such as understanding your means and living within them, and more importantly, why spending is better than saving.