Learning to save & budget better

I have never been good at saving money. As my dad always said, "that money's burning a hole in your pocket."

In an effort to curb some bad habits and get myself into a more secure financial seat, I signed up for a free personal finance seminar here at Emory University through their Work Life Program.

I did, in fact, learn something new! Alok Deshpande, of SmartPath Financial, gave us all some very easy-to-follow and valuable information for financial planning.

The overall premise (easier said than done!) is to make more than you spend. But what really helped me a lot is the "7 Smart Goals."

1. Ensure you're getting your retirement match. For me, this was a no-brainer. Emory has one of the absolute best retirement matches I've ever seen (in my short, nearly decade-long career, of course.) Right upfront, Emory contributes 6 percent of my salary. If I contribute 3 percent of my salary (which I do), they'll chip in another 2 percent. So I'm already putting 11 percent of my salary into retirement each month.
2. Build up one month's savings for an emergency. 
3. Pay off bad debt. This is debt like credit cards, medical bills, money you owe family or friends, private loans, etc.
4. Expand your savings to cover three to six months in an emergency.
5. Contribute 20 percent of your gross income to retirement. (For me, this would mean bumping my own contribution from 3 percent to 11 percent, because Alok counts your company match.)
6. Begin saving for your child's college education.
7. Save for your "bucket list" items, like traveling, a boat, a pygmy hippopotamus, etc.

You start with Goal 1, and don't move forward until it's completed. So if you have credit card debt, like me, you pay only the minimum until you have your month's emergency fund saved.

However, my issue, like my dad says, is that savings always seems to burn a hole in my pocket. So today, I opened a CD with Ally Bank online. It's got a much higher rate than Wells Fargo could offer me, with no minimum deposit to open. I will have a percentage of my monthly salary directly deposited each month.

I'm really optimistic that this plan will work for me and that having my emergency savings in an online banking CD like Ally's will discourage me from tapping into it for unnecessary items.

I'll let you know how it goes. What do you do to protect your savings?