Reach your savings goal one day at a time.
Welcome to Day One of the Micro Saving Challenge.
Would you like to reach your savings goal one day at a time? This challenge isn’t about making you rich overnight. It is meant to be a plan which uses small, baby steps to help you reach your saving goal one day at a time. I am going to focus on what can be done in just under three months. If I can do this for three months I know that I will find it motivating to move to a six-month goal and so on.
If you are short on time you can go straight to the FREE 10 Day Micro Saving Challenge worksheet which has all the steps summarised, some extra money-saving tips, and plenty of space to make some notes of further small changes you can make.
I am going to post a new entry each day talking about the challenges I have faced and the small changes I have made to get to my money-saving goal.
Step One
Now before you start you will need to set a savings goal and timeline. I really want to challenge myself to keep this as a separate pot of money away from Christmas. Now I know that for some of you, this is not a luxury you can afford. The important message is to make this workable for you.
Savings goal and timeline set? Let’s go!
For my challenge I want to save £500 by December 31st. As I said my challenge is to not spend this money at Christmas time.
STEP TWO
Find a separate bank account if possible. This will reduce the temptation to spend your nest egg. You could take things one step further and open an account with a completely different bank.
I already have an account away from my normal current account which is easy to manage and I really like (I’m not a fan of high street banks).
STEP three
Download our Micro Saving template here. I have included an example plan which I am going to follow here each day and I have also added a blank one for you. Remember our objective is to reach our saving goal one day at a time
Don’t overcommit yourself to something you cannot achieve. Keep it simple and manageable. After a month we will come back and review and see what improvements we can make.
Step Four
So we will start with the big ticket items first. Let’s build confidence and make some early progress.
You have probably heard of the 52-week savings challenge where you save an amount equivalent to the number of the day in the year. Firstly you could save 1p on day one and then on day 366 you would save £3.66. The second option is to save in reverse whereby you are saving the larger amounts upfront, so on day 1 you save £3.66 and on day 366 you save 1p. Using this method across the entire year you can save over £1,000.
To be honest I completely missed the boat on this challenge this year. Work got in the way and I just never got around to it. There is no reason to despair, we are going to do our own 11 week challenge.
On the attached worksheet I have put three different challenges to take us up to December 31st. The first saves just over £30, the second £155, and the third £255.
Your homework for today is to pick a challenge that works for you and transfer the amount of money corresponding to today’s date, into your savings account.
So if you pick challenge one you transfer 78p, challenge two £2.89, and challenge three is also £2.89.
I will remind you tomorrow to transfer the amount for the second day of our challenge.
Have you read our guide to having Christmas on a Budget?
Are you interested in following our progress? Join the conversation on our social media pages.
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