For those that want to optimize the way to make their money grow, learning how to save money is a good start. Indeed, reducing short-term debt can yield the highest return you've ever seen.

While saving money is often looked upon as the ugly duckling in the world of personal finance, setting up a plan to achieve better monthly savings can be difficult for many. Here is a beginners ' guide to setting up a savings strategy and make your money grow.

There are a couple of basic steps that need to be taken, one step at a time, but the results are life-changing.  For example, you need to at least know what your current expenses are (i.e.  have a basic budget) as this will allow you to look for areas where to decrease your expenses to save money.

Step 1 - Set aside some time for discipline: The first step is to set aside a specific amount of time that you will dedicate to save money and build your personal portfolio. While it may take more time in the beginning while you are getting used to your new habits, it will still take much less time than trying to learn a completely new investment strategy. If you can set aside 2 to 3 hours a week, you will have plenty of time to identify great opportunities.

Step 2 - Decrease your spending by $100 a month: With the time you've set aside in step one, you can now identify how to save $100 per month to invest. While most people assume that doing this requires sacrifice and suffering, you can actually achieve this easily through a disciplined approach. There are a wide variety of steps you can take to accomplish this and simply visiting sites with promotional offers like this or one that is similar should give you plenty of ideas on how to accomplish this.

Step 3 - Pay off debts: The third part is to take the money that has been saved and put it to work for you. Because the main focus of your time, for the time being, is to find ways to save money, the investing it should take less time. Once the strategy put in place, you can spend more time on optimizing the investment vehicles. If you still have debts, the first thing to do with the new $100 savings, is to pay off the debts. Paying off your debt is a guaranteed return with no risk or effort. $100 to decrease a 24% interest credit card provides you with an immediate 24% return on your investment. Once all your credit card debts and personal loans are paid off, you can move onto step 3. Large debt amounts at low interest rates such as car loans and mortgages are not to be covered by this strategy. Unless you believe that your investment strategy will yield a lower return than the loan interest rate, you should keep on paying off your long term, low interest rate, loans at the same pace as before.

Step 4 - Invest in an index fund: Keeping in mind that we are more interested in finding ways to save money instead of how to invest it (until no more savings can be achieved), once all your debts are paid off, you should place any money you save into a long term and low fee investment vehicle. Index funds or exchange traded funds (ETF) fit this long term strategy quite well.

Step 5 - Continue to find ways to save: While finding a way to save an extra $100 a month should be your initial goal, it's just the beginning. Like with all investments you make, you want to maximize the return on the investment to the greatest possible amount. Make sure to use the time you set aside each week to continue to search for new ways to save money. Keep on paying off your short-term, high interest debts first, and then invest in low fee investment vehicles. It is important to keep the discipline to do this until

you built a fund of about $50,000 in your index fund. Once you have reached this point, you will begin to take some of your time to learn how to diversify your portfolio.. This is a basic but powerful strategy that can be tweaked to fit your financial goals. It should produce much greater long term returns than spending all your time trying to figure out the best place to put the money you currently have.