Money

Al·
General
·1 min read

I’m terrible with money. I have used this excuse for as long as I can remember to justify being, well, terrible with money. But that has to stop. I’m 37 now and it’s about time I grew up and realised that this excuse is actually no excuse. I posted a few days ago about taking a year to “Stand still. Take stock. Make no sudden moves. Think things through.” I said that 2015 would be the year that I “look back and say, I’m further forward than I was 365 days ago.”

I make a fair wage doing a decent job. I have enough to get by. But I am frivolous. I spend. It’s the old adage of money burning a hole in one’s pocket. In order to assist me in this I am going to start saving using the 50p 52 week money challenge:

Starting with 50p and adding another 50p to the total each week I will have saved £689 by the end of 2015. That will be £689 more than I have saved before in my life. Additionally I intend to remove my overdraft, payback my debt to my Mum (who, God bless her, is always too happy to help her Son out(!)) and still have a reasonably active social life. A big ask, but if you don’t have goals you’ll never meet goals.

Wish me luck, and if I’m ever struggling, don’t be too tight when I ask you for 50p.

11 Comments

  1. What a great idea. It’s really easy to put aside just “a few coins”, but it really adds up. I found when I first started saving that I would get a couple hundred bucks, but then find something “that I just had to have”, and would take it out of savings. But one time, I was able to get $1000, and that was when the light bulb went on. If I stopped taking it out, it really added up and I didn’t miss the little things that I had been spending money on. It felt much better having the savings then having a new pair of shoes or a new dress. If you really want to motivate yourself, consider this. If you do this for one year, and invest the 689 with a 5% return, by the time you retire (in 30 years) it will be worth 3,078. If you continue to invest 689 a year, you will have 50,933 when you retire. Not bad for “a few coins” a day. Good luck!

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  2. This is a great idea and it’s incredible how fast it looks like it accumulates after a while! I should also look more after my money, but I think I’ll do it more in a “look at the food budget and cut the fat” way. Because I probably do not need to buy as much as I do… and it’s ridiculous how the amount of food we have sometimes makes us forget about old stuff in the fridge and then we just lose it. But I’m not good at holding budget. So I’ll try that for a while then, and when that does not work, I’ll try it your way!

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  3. Don’t forget to save your cash in an interest-bearing account! Saving is always the hard part. I really appreciated it when I got a checking/savings combo that would put $1 into my savings account every time I used my debit card (which meant $1-5 most days.) In the States, there are also some checking/savings combos that “save the change.” Basically, you pay $x.xx to the retailer, and the bank will round up to the next whole dollar amount, and put the extra change into a savings account. They make saving easy! Unfortunately, banks now also make *un*saving just as easy. Instead of having to go into the bank to withdraw from my savings account, I can go online and instantly transfer from one account to the other. So it’s a matter of ensuring I don’t do that, which is sometimes a battle (especially when my pennies are screaming from being pinched so hard.)

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  4. Great idea, it soon racks up. Are you planning on keeping the money in the bank or are you going to get one of those rusty old biscuit tins to keep under your bed? Either way, best of luck with it all. THe most I’ve ever managed to save was around £50!

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  5. I love this idea – I never thought of doing something like this before. It’s only when you see things written down logically in that way that you think “hang on a minute, this is easier than I thought…..”.

    As one who is pitiful where money is concerned, I’m feeling inspired to take up your 50p challenge and see how I far I can get without it burning a hole in my pocket.

    Good luck!

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  7. Just checking – to make sure you’ve followed through. You should have a few coins in that bottle by now! I also wanted to give you another piece of advice that I found really helpful when I first started saving. Have a little money taken out of you paycheck every pay period. If you don’t see it, you can’t spend it. I don’t know if you guys have IRAs (individual retirement accounts) but invest in something like that. Another calculation (I’m a little on the obsessive/compulsive side), if you put $50 (or pounds) away every month for the next 30 years at 5% interest, you’d have over $40,000. If you did something like you 50p a day thing, in that every year you add $10 to your monthly savings (so year 2 you’d save 60/month, year 3 70/month, etc) at the end of 30 years you’d have $135,000. Pretty impressive, huh?

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      1. Great photo, can’t wait to see it in a few months. It will fill up faster than you think. Good luck!

  8. Wow… this is rather sobering! It’s crazy to think that just putting that little bit of money aside every week, not even every day, can save you so much in the long run. I may have to convince my boyfriend to try this as he’s not so great at budgeting either… This just might work!

    Reply

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