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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   817 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for February 4, 2026

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Finances: Made 3.8 (post tax) last month. Only spent 3.2k, which is about a 16% savings rate. Would like to get this closer to 20%.

For several years I've been trying to follow the savings advice laid out in The Barefoot Investor:

  1. In addition to your current account, create three savings accounts respectively called fire extinguisher, smile and splurge.
    • Fire extinguisher is your long-term savings (e.g. if you're saving up for a car, a deposit on a mortgage etc., it'll be coming out of here).
    • Smile is your short-term savings, a special treat you're saving up that makes you smile when you think of it (e.g. a holiday, a new guitar).
    • Splurge is for when you want to treat yourself that month, before your next pay day (e.g. dates, going to the pub with your friends, fast food etc.).
    • All other expenses (groceries, utilities, rent/mortgage payments etc.) are paid out of your current account.
  2. The day you get paid, deposit 10% of your pay into smile, 10% into splurge and 20% into fire extinguisher.
  3. Do not dip into smile or fire extinguisher until using them for their intended purpose.
  4. If you're eating out, going out for drinks etc., you should only use splurge. If splurge is empty, you should not do any of these activities until you have replenished it. So if you splashed out the weekend after payday and now splurge is empty, it's quiet nights in and home cooking until your next payday.

Obviously it's a big ask to jump directly from saving 16% of your income to 30%. As an experiment on your next pay day, you might try putting 10% in splurge, 5% in smile and 5% in fire extinguisher. Then each month, increment smile and fire extinguisher by 1% apiece to steadily acclimatise yourself to this way of doing things, until you've met the target for the relevant account. (I always put 10% into smile, but have yet to manage putting more than 16% into fire extinguisher.)

The book also recommends putting two grand into an account in a completely different financial institution from your current and savings account. This is your rainy-day fund, for genuine life-or-death emergencies. The purpose of putting it into a different financial institution is to introduce friction so that you won't be tempted to dip into it to pay for your holidays. To this end, I put €2,000 in a government bond which pays out 10% interest if left to appreciate for ten years.

So you guys have all these separate accounts and then reconcile your credit card spending at the end of the month by carefully transferring the appropriate funds from one to the other? Sounds like a lot of work.

It's all debit cards, I have one debit card associated with my current account and one associated with splurge. Salary gets paid into my current account, and on pay day I transfer funds from that into my savings accounts and the splurge account. Takes all of five minutes.

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