Making money is a great thing.  Investing money wisely is a wonderful idea.  What about saving money?  It may not fill your head with visions of Rockefellerian wealth, but it’s just as important.  Not only do you need to stuff that rainy day account for when the thunderstorms hit, research has also demonstrated that there is a link between adequate savings levels an the likelihood of positive investment experiences.

And that brings us to today’s question.  How do you increase savings?  Here are a few pointers that should shed the light on how to increase savings without completely reorganizing every last aspect of your life into an impossible-to-meet series of goals.  Basically, we’re talking about stuffing the coffers the easy way.

Save Your Change.  This recommendation, echoed by WideOpenWallet, is a nifty way to boost your savings account totals.  Instead of letting that change sit around in jars or the console of your car where it’s slowly but surely used for some other purposes, make a conscious effort to deposit it into your savings account regular.  If you take that $.19 you get back after buying a $1.81 cup of coffee every morning and the $.75 you get back from the vending machine on that $1.25 Dr. Pepper you buy every afternoon at work, it will start to add up over time.

Give up a Vice.  We all have our vices.  Some of us like to pretend like we’re the Marlboro man as we enjoy a drag off of a cigarette.  Some of us enjoy one more nightcap than we really need in the evening.  There are even those of us who will occasionally make a quick stop at the drive through for the bean and cheese burrito with sour cream (hold the onions, please).  You can make yourself a healthier person will simultaneously boosting your savings if you give up one of your vices. Gomestic notes the financial power of giving up bad habits, too, so I’m not alone on this one.  In my opinion, the trick to really making this pay off?  Figure out how much you’re spending to satisfy your not-so-wise craving.  Then, make a point of putting something approximating that figure into savings on a weekly or monthly basis.  If you just stop smoking and don’t commit to using the change to boost your savings, you’ll just find some other way to spend the dough.

Limit Access.  VictoriaSan raises an interesting point.  It’s  harder to figure out a way to really increase your savings when it’s too easy to yank the money out of the account on a whim.  If your checking account doubles as your your savings account, it’s time to visit your bank to set up a separate account.  But don’t stop there.  Take the additional step of limiting access to the funds at ATMs, etc.  You might even want to lock it out with respect to online access, so you don’t feel that urge to transfer money into checking just to oblige the urge for a spending spree.  Sure, it’s inefficient to lock down your account that way, but it will keep you from robbing the ol’ piggy bank.

Now, those little tips aren’t so horrible are they?  They won’t force you to re-budget every aspect of your personal finances and you won’t need to change everything about your life to make them work.  The toughest one on the list, giving up a bad habit, has its difficulty counteracted by the fact that it will make you happier and healthier in the long run, anyway.

Savings are an important part of your overall financial well-being.  Make a point to find and use some easy ways to increase your savins totals.