Nobody needs to tell you that times are tough everywhere. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just wave a magic wand and fix everything that’s wrong with the world’s economy!

A practical, if not very idealistic, suggestion is to “tend your own garden” by starting to save in little ways that can add up over time. You’re familiar with the old saying, “Great oaks from little acorns grow.” Well, that’s the principle we’re advocating here on a modest scale: taking a small sum – perhaps the equivalent of lunch at a fast-food restaurant – on a regular basis, stashing it away, and letting it grow. Think of it as paying yourself first.

Every week on the same day of the week, take a certain amount – say, $5 – out of your pocket and put it away in a container of some sort. Five bucks each and every week. No cheating! No skipping a week on any pretext. Put it away, out of sight, and leave it there. Pretend it doesn’t exist. At the end of a year, you’ll have $260 that almost certainly would have vanished otherwise.

But hold on! Don’t go right out and celebrate by blowing your little fund on cabernet sauvignon or filet mignon. Instead, stick that $260 in a savings account, which might pay something like .75% interest. Granted, that isn’t a whole lot, but by the end of the following year you’ll have $261.95 that you didn’t spend. And over the course of that year, you’ve been busy saving another $260. Grand total: $521.95. Still not a fortune, but an amount that’s beginning to gain respectability.

Now, if you continue to put away that weekly $5 for another couple of years, your modest nest egg will have grown to more than $1,000. You can take a thousand bucks and put it in a CD (Certificate of Deposit), leaving the remainder in your savings account. The CD will pay higher interest than the savings account. In the meantime, of course, you’re still socking away the weekly five-spot.

Although your savings won’t grow by leaps and bounds, the money you regularly stash away is money you aren’t spending. Good things can eventually happen because you had the foresight and self-discipline to put away $5 each and every week and leave it untouched. You paid yourself first.

We certainly don’t claim that you’ll end up with great oaks, but you will have a few sturdy saplings where nothing much had been growing before.

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