With a new year comes new goals – and while it’s often more fun to spend than it is to save, it doesn’t have to be! If you resolved to save more this year, here are several fun and easy savings challenges that can help you along the way.
52-Week Savings Challenge
This challenge is an easy way to save more than $1,000 in a year. The basic premise is that you save $1 the first week of the year, $2 the second week, $3 the third week and continue this pattern each week for the remainder of the year. By the time you reach the end of the year and save your final $52, you’ll have $1,378.
The beauty of this type of challenge is that it starts off so slowly, but there are plenty of ways to customize the challenge to fit your needs. If you wanted your weekly savings amount to get easier as the year goes on, you could save $52 the first week, $51 the second week and so on. No matter which method you decide on, by the end of the year, you’ll have built up a savings habit.
365-Day Nickel Challenge
This challenge is similar to the 52-week challenge, but it starts smaller and ends larger. Instead of adding to what you save each week, you add to it each day. In this challenge, you start on January 1 with $0.05 and add a nickel to your daily savings rate each day. By the end of the year, you’ll have saved $3,339.
This challenge is a good idea if you want to slowly set aside money and create a habit of regularly saving throughout the year.
Spare Change Challenge
This challenge is as simple as it sounds – you save up your spare change for the duration of the year. There’s something extremely satisfying about seeing your money grow over time.
The most common method is to simply take any spare change you have at the end of the day and add it to a change jar. Kids especially love to see the contents of the jar multiply over time. To really drive the savings lesson home, you can deposit the funds from the jar into a savings account at the end of the month. Show your kids how savings accounts can help you save even more thanks to dividends - we even have savings accounts designed specifically for kids!
You might be thinking that you don’t actually have that much spare change since you rarely spend cash. Luckily, there are plenty of apps designed to help you save your virtual “spare change” by rounding up to the nearest dollar or saving spare change over time.
Whether or not you decide to participate in any sort of savings challenge, ACU of Texas is here to help on your savings journey with plenty of savings products to help you along the way!
