In the world of saving money and accumulating wealth, one piece of advice that is often given is to “pay yourself first” as a way to make sure that you put some money away. While this is good advice, it may not always be practical and sometimes “life happens” and you may be unable to do that in a given month and still have enough to pay all your bills.

Because of this, I don’t entirely agree with the “pay yourself first” way of thinking but instead say “charge yourself a late fee” for your savings deposits. By charging yourself a late fee, you can experience several benefits.

The way to do this is to consider your savings contribution as one of your monthly bills that you must pay. In the same way that you will get a late fee for not paying one of your bills on time, force yourself to deposit a bit extra if the contribution is late.

This is beneficial for a couple of reasons, for one thing, by considering it one of your bills, if you have a situation where the paycheck may not stretch quite far enough in a given month, you can keep all your bills paid (because you didn’t pay yourself first) and not get late fees and bad credit scores because of it. However, the second benefit is that by paying yourself the late fee instead of some other organization, you are essentially saving more. In fact, you could probably come up with a late fee that far exceeds any interest you would have earned on that money had you put it in the account sooner.

By implementing a late fee on yourself, you will also have a better chance of making yourself make regular contributions to your savings plan because if you don’t do it on time and on a regular basis, the late fee will cut in to your “disposable income” and the money that you will use to take a vacation, go out to eat, etc.