I never thought I could afford Invisalign, but a simple savings strategy helped me sock away nearly $5,000 in 7 months

Alexis Rhiannon

Jan 25, 2020, 02:04 IST

I never thought I could afford Invisalign, but a simple savings strategy helped me sock away nearly $5,000 in 7 months

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The author is not pictured.

I've watched my teeth shift out of alignment over the past five years and considered Invisalign, but the price tag was just too high at around $5,000.
When I moved in with my boyfriend, though, I was paying substantially less to share an apartment - $630 less.
So instead of letting myself spend that money, I set up automatic transfers to a high-yield savings account and was able to afford Invisalign in just seven months, even with a cross-country move in the middle.
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For the past five years, as my once-straight teeth moved further and further out of alignment, Invisalign was a dream that I returned to again and again. But a combination of the $5,000 price tag and my own feelings of guilt kept me pushing the purchase down the line indefinitely. After all, it was my own negligence about wearing my retainers the first time around that got me into this fix, so it felt wasteful to throw even more money at the problem.

But finally, I lit upon a plan that would help me break the cycle of procrastination and regret once and for all. The trick was a high-yield savings account (HYSA) and a savings plan of my own devising that helped me save for this big-ticket item, all while hardly noticing I was putting money away.

My savings strategy

In late 2018, I moved in with my boyfriend, and we agreed on a rent split that would allow each of us to save $630 per month - that sum was the difference between what we were each paying for rent before moving in together and what we were paying to split our new place.

That's a pretty significant chunk of change, but my expenses have a pesky little habit of expanding to match my income. So to counter my tendency to spend any money that's right in front of my face, I set up an automatic monthly transfer to whoosh that cash out of my checking account and into a Simple savings account before I knew the difference.

Simple is an online banking company based out of my own hometown of Portland, Oregon that my boyfriend and I were initially drawn to because of the ease of use of its Shared Accounts. (Each partner gets their own individual account in addition to a shared account, which we use to pay for joint purchases like household goods and utility payments to avoid fully pooling our finances.) But the company also offers a variety of savings tools that quickly became even more compelling.

At first, my $630 deposits went into my Safe-to-Spend account, but I soon swapped to an option called Protected Goals, a high-yield savings account that offered a 1.75% annual percentage yield (APY) when I signed up, a rate much preferable than anything I'd beenoffered for a checking account.

Even better, that rate jumps up when your balance rises over $10,000, a milestone that a little fast math told me I'd pass after 16 months of my savings plan. (Provided I didn't make any withdrawals, that is, which Simple encourages by automatically keeping your Protected Goals balance hidden on its main screen to limit the temptation to chip away at it.)

So I set up the HYSA, I set up my monthly transfers, and I put the whole business out of my mind.

And then, life happened.

An unexpected cross-country move pushed Invisalign to the bottom of my list

In early February 2019, my boyfriend was unexpectedly offered his dream job. It required a cross-country move - from New York City to Los Angeles - with just a month of notice, triggering a flurry of packing, shipping, selling, apartment hunting, and goodbyes.

I kept telling myself that if I ever needed to, I could cancel that monthly transfer in order to put the money toward our move, but somehow, it never became necessary. We hewed tightly to our budget, buoyed by a generous relocation fee, and thankfully, neither one of us had to dip into our savings. Because I'd never gotten used to seeing that extra $630 in my bank account every month, I neither spent it nor missed it. It truly was out of sight and out of mind.

Once we landed in LA, the challenges mounted: adjusting to a new city, a new apartment, new jobs, and a new community. The months came and went, and Invisalign remained at the bottom of my list. But because I'd already put the wheels in motion on my savings plan, it turned out there was no safer place to be than the bottom of my list during that mad scramble.

Finally saying yes to Invisalign

It was late summer by the time we got our health insurance in order, and I finally got around to setting up a dental appointment. I sat in the chair through the cleaning and the speech about flossing, and when I was asked whether I'd ever considered Invisalign, I opened my mouth as usual to politely demur.

Except this time, I realized, I didn't have to. When I asked the receptionist about the cost of the plan, she informed me that it was just $4,390, still a hefty sum, but well under what I'd assumed from my online research, and one that I'd racked up in just seven months of dedicated saving and compounding interest. (Dedicated saving that I barely had to give a second thought to, mind you.)

I decided to wait another six months until my next appointment to make sure it was really something I wanted, and in January 2020, after five years of day-dreaming about it, I finally pulled the trigger on Invisalign.

Even better, because I was able to pay for the procedure in advance instead of joining my dental office's payment plan, I was able to save an additional 3%, bringing my cost down by $131.70, for a total of $4,258.30.

I could even have decreased it by an additional 2% by paying by check, but there was no way I was missing out on the points from such a large purchase. I charged the balance to my Chase Sapphire Preferred card to take the best advantage of the card's rewards, and then moved the money from my Protected Goals to my Safe-to-Spend account to pay my card off right away.

Best of all, there's still plenty left over from all those additional months of socking away funds, with the balance growing with every passing month. So I can enjoy my newly straightening smile without the internalized guilt of draining an account.

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