"I can't afford to save"

This is sometimes true, and I'll begin with the people for whom it is.

If your income doesn't cover rent, energy, food, travel to work and the other essentials, or covers them with nothing over, then you can't afford to save. No rearrangement of the order will create money that isn't there. Advice to pay yourself first is useless to someone who can't pay the electricity bill, and a book that pretended otherwise would deserve to be thrown across the room. If that's your position, what you need is a check of what you may be entitled to, help with any debts, and, if things are tight enough, emergency support. Citizens Advice can help with all three, and it's free.

One scheme is worth knowing about. If you receive Universal Credit and had some take-home pay in your last assessment period, you may be eligible for Help to Save. It's a government-backed savings account. You can pay in between one pound and fifty pounds each calendar month, and you don't have to pay in every month. After two years you get a tax-free bonus of 50 per cent of the highest balance you've reached, and there's a second bonus after four years. You get any bonus you've earned even if you've withdrawn money. No ordinary savings account comes close to that rate of return. The details are on GOV.UK, and they're as I found them in September 2026.

Now for everyone else. Many people who say they can't afford to save are in a different position. Their essentials are covered. Beyond the essentials there's a fair amount of spending that they've chosen, even though it no longer feels like a choice. "I can't afford to save" is said sincerely, on the evidence of the twenty-seventh, when there's visibly nothing left. But chapter 3 explained why there's nothing left on the twenty-seventh whatever the income. The same thing happens to people on twice your salary. So an empty account at the end of the month doesn't tell you whether you can afford to save.

There's a quick way to tell which group you're in. Look at last month's spending and ask whether there was fifty pounds of it that you could have done without, with no real hardship. Fifty pounds needn't have been wasted for the answer to be yes. It only has to be money whose absence you'd have adapted to. If the honest answer is no, the first part of this chapter applies to you. If it's yes, then you can afford to save fifty pounds a month. What's been missing is a way of getting that fifty pounds out of the account before the month absorbs it.

This leads to the point I most want to make in this chapter. The amount matters much less than the order. Someone who moves twenty-five pounds on payday, every payday, is a saver. Their pot grows every month, and their month has adapted to the smaller balance. Someone who intends to save three hundred at the end of the month, and manages it twice a year, isn't. So when you set up your transfer, don't start from what you feel you ought to be saving. Start with an amount so small that you're sure you won't have to claw it back. You can raise it later. What matters at the start is that it goes out first and that you leave it where it is.