How I Saved $2,000 in Two Months

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

Saving $2,000 in two months doesn’t really seem like all that impressive of a feat does it? You see blogs and videos all the time telling you how to make $2,000 a day. Why would you want to know how to save $2,000 in two months? The first question is are you making $2,000 a day, or was that content speculative at best and really didn’t help you? The second question is regardless of your income, do you currently have $2,000 saved anywhere? If you’re not making $2,000 a day, or you don’t have $2,000 saved, then maybe what I have to say here is worth your while.

During the first half of 2018, I was working for Pizza Hut as a shift manager. I was making a lot of money for that job description, because I was in constant overtime. This was after I was promised that I wouldn’t be getting overtime. There were a number of problems with that job, and I left. I was willing to make less money to have less stress. I went to work as an Uber Eats driver, so I definitely was making less money.

In fact, it became clear after the football season was over that Uber Eats is basically unsustainable as a full time job. I was averaging $10 to $12 an hour most nights gross. I was putting two to three times more miles on my vehicles than I did as a pizza driver, and spending two to three times more miles on gas. By the way, delivering pizza has a mostly higher average most nights. Once 2019 rolled around, I went to Domino’s and suffered having a set schedule to actually have money leftover at the end of the month.

The problem is that I didn’t have any money set aside to pay my Uber Eats taxes and it was late February when I started working at Domino’s. This meant that I had two months to save as much money as I could, so I could turn in my stuff to my CPA on April 15. The first two weeks were a little slow, because they needed to get me trained and set me on a schedule that was full time. Once I was full time, I worked as much as I could while having two days off. I got a few hours of overtime each week. I saved almost all of my tips, barely spending any money during that time.

It took one paycheck for child support to be pulled from my check, so I wasn’t making much there. It was all about not spending my tips, except to pay bills, to eat, and to keep my vehicles running so I had a job.

And that’s it.

Did you think there was some crazy epiphany? I stopped spending money on anything unnecessary for a brief amount of time and I saved $1,000 per month.

The thing is that when we’re faced with bad consequences, we have this ability to cut back and get caught up or save. The problem is that we don’t do this proactively. I may not be able to say this without fear of contradiction, because people love to contradict, but I can say this knowing that I’m likely correct: 99% of us could figure out a way to save $1,000 a month either by cutting back our expenses, increasing our income, or a combination of both.

By the way, it turned out that Pizza Hut was over withholding my check by a significant amount. They had an odd method that was supposed to more accurately predict your taxes on tips and such, but it clearly overdid it. This meant that in spite of not setting aside any money to pay my Uber Eats taxes, it didn’t matter because they were paid already from over withholding by Pizza Hut, so I got a $300 return. I still have the $2,000.

Chris McGinty is a blogger who has never had more than $4,000 saved, so I guess he has a measurable goal to be trying to attain. No excuses, man. You yourself just said it could be done.