Five dollars.

It’s so many things to so many different people. It can be the amount of tax on a purchase, it is the average cost of a meal at a fast food place, and it is the amount that we’ll have to start placing into vending machines in the airport for a 20oz soda in about ten years, not to mention a gallon of gas.

Five dollars.

When I think about what I do with this seemingly insignificant amount of money, I cringe. I ate lunch yesterday @ Burger King, the total being $3.21. Since I use the Keep the Change program w/ Bank of America, they round that up to $4, so in my mind, it’s basically five dollars. When I go to eat at a restaurant, this miniature Abraham Lincoln in my pocket represents so much more to a waiter or waitress. My night of splurging is their livelihood, and some of them definitely know the value of that particular dead president.

Five dollars.

We know what five dollars is, but let’s take a look at what it isn’t. A regular ticket at a movie theatre. An appropriate contribution to church for a 45 year-old Wall Street broker. The cost to wash your car at a full-service location. A parking space in a downtown area. Five dollars is a lot of things to a lot of people, but in these examples it just doesn’t cut the mustard. So why is Da Hustler so stuck on this one denomination of money?

Quite simply: because it holds power.

You can change your life five dollars at a time, every day. When I started thinking about the power of Abe, I realize it was time to use it for my benefit. The simplest way I could think of was just to save it. Don’t spend it. Hoard it. It works for you a lot better when it is close to you, and you can’t be close to something that you are always giving away.

Da Hustler is doing just that – save my five dollars – and you can too! Just think about what you spend this money on every day: sure you have to eat, but do you absolutely need to eat those meals that cost, well, five dollars? You can eat healthier and simpler by using the dollar menu at a lot of places, and getting water as your beverage. Now you’ve just cut $2.00 or more from the cost of your meal, and you’re nearly halfway to the goal. What else can you cut? Morning coffee? Jelly doughnut? An unhealthy midday snack? That pack of cigarettes? Take a look at what you spend your money on each day, and I bet there is something that you can do without.

Voila! You’ve just saved your five dollars! Now what are you going to do with it? Well, unless or until you have built-up enough discipline to place yourself on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly savings plan, I recommend you place this five dollar savings in a jar, piggy bank, or transfer it to a savings account daily. Da Hustler does this, and I’ve found that it forces you to really examine what you spend your money on, plus gets you in the habit of saving your own money more regularly. The caveat is that you cannot touch the money that you save! You have to basically forget that it is there. Let’s look at the savings that you can realize after a whole year of this:

$5 day ~ $150/month

$150 x 12 = $1800/year

Not too bad, but even this doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of people to save on a regular basis. Let’s do what hustlers do and make this even more attractive: keep the same formula for saving, but add an extra five dollars the next month to your daily savings plan, and another five the month after that. Not only will you have to save more money, but you may have to also make more as well! But of course, that’s what hustlers do! Now here is the earnings with the revised example:

Month 1: $150 saved

Month 2: $300 saved that month

Month 3: $450 saved that month

Month 6: $900 saved that month

Month 12: $1800 saved that month

Over the course of the entire year, you would have saved $11,700! That’s a small car! (can you say Kia, Civic or Scion?) Not only will you save a boatload of money, but by the end of a year’s time you will be in a totally different mindset, because you would have forced yourself to find ways to make more money to save! Can you imagine being able to save $60/day? That means you would make a whole lot more than that to be able to put back that much and be comfortable. And one thing Da Hustler knows about money: the more you have, the more you really don’t want to spend it. This is why you rarely see millionaires going on extravagant shopping sprees; when you know you have the ability to purchase or do something, the appeal is that much less. Make this kind of thinking your goal, and you’ll be amazed at how much your life can change.

Five dollars at a time.