Trick Yourself Into Saving Money

Earlier this month we posted a couple of tricks to save money:

• Rounding up each transaction in your checkbook.
  
• Only buy what you can carry out of the store.

Here’s another, courtesy of Phil Villarreal @ The Consumerist:

It's one thing to realize you should be saving money in order to strive for a particular financial goal or solidify your long-term future, but it's another to generate the discipline to actually leave yourself with enough funds left over to put away.

Budgets Are Sexy asked Twitter followers to chime in with the ways they manage to trick themselves into saving money, and drew several effective responses.

Here was my contribution to the post:

I'd say the best way is to use personal finance software to make yourself arduously catalog and break down every purchase. For instance, an $80 trip to Target would mean a mandatory 10-minute endeavor in which you have to break down every item into its specific category, making you think twice before tossing random products into your basket on the next trip.

Other tips included starting an online savings account to restrict direct access to the funds and setting up automatic transfers that save small amounts so small you won't realize they're missing.

How do you fool yourself into saving more?