I got employed straight out of college, but I did not get to make my best financial decision until a few months later.

First, I was lucky. The company that had given me an internship when I was in school was so happy with my work there that they offered me a position even before I had graduated.

A bonus came from my boss’ offer to pay for my lunch and bus fare. Because I was still living with my parents, and they still considered me penniless, they used to give me bus fare, and that is how I ended up with some money to spare.

Because I had a mobile phone, and mobile money was all the rage at the time, I would deposit my stipend into the mobile money account. I figured out that this was much better than having cash at hand, which would have gone into a recently developed but irrational love for boots and leather.

For a while, I congratulated myself on being able to save, but the money did not last to the end of the month because, well, I wasn’t getting paid enough. Maybe there was some truth to this, or it was the naïveté of youth that did not allow me to understand that no amount is ever enough.

Eventually though, I decided to try going back to the ‘old school’ and start saving my peanuts in an actual bank account. I had an actual account that had gone dormant because I was not even sure why I had opened it in the first place.

I had resisted putting any cash in it as I felt that the money I was getting was too little to bank and I had told myself that there was no point in saving the pocket change that got left over after I subtracted what I needed.

Deciding to put the money in the account was purely a random decision as I had no solid reason for changing what I had been doing all along and so I did not really expect to see any change.

To my surprise, my savings actually started to grow and I could see no major change I had made to my lifestyle besides starting to save in a bank as opposed to in my phone.

Granted, I was never the partying type but I believe that my extreme love for candies and chocolates was a viable replacement for that.

To date, I always make it a point to take any amount that I earn from my main and side hustles straight to the bank; and while you may argue that most banks nowadays are linked to our phones anyway, the high transactions fees tend to be inhibitory and it is a service that one may opt-out of anyway.

To date, I can say that the best financial decision I have ever made was starting to save in an actual bank as opposed to attempting to save in my phone.

With the increased ability to pay for most things using mobile money comes the increased temptation to spend whatever you have on your phone, but with the money locked away in a bank, a saving is locked in, and that’s good for me, at least for now.