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Your car breaks down—again. As you wait for the tow truck, you ask yourself how you will find the money to pay for repairs. You have to have your car to get to work. Your credit cards are near their limit. You find yourself wondering if you really needed to buy that new sofa last week, using up more of your credit card limit. Now you are going to have to load up on even more credit card debt to repair your car. You do not have much in savings. After paying your monthly bills, there just never seems to be enough left over. You are really wishing that you had made more effort to save a little each month.

Unfortunately, many of us find ourselves, at some point in our lives, in this very position: large credit card debt, monthly expenses that are almost too much to handle, and little or no savings. You hear about the stock market. Maybe if you tried some basic money saving techniques, you would eventually have enough to invest. How do you get started?

Here are some of the best tips you can follow today:

Pay yourself first.
Put yourself in your budget as a creditor and pay yourself each month as surely as you pay your rent or house payment. After all, you need some financial security.

Set a short-term savings goal.
It’s important to have an emergency savings fund that’s equal to three to six months’ of your salary. If you take home $1,500 a month, you’ll want $4,500 in the fund to cover living expenses in case of a job loss or illness. This needs to be a priority; having these savings will keep you from reaching for that credit card the next time the car dies, but you don’t want to skip credit card or mortgage payments for emergency savings.