I’m back on the Radio Verulum Drivetime show this evening with my monthly thrifty slot, and one of the things I’m going to be talking about is thrifty new years resolutions.
New years resolutions can scare some people, but actually they’re a perfect opportunity to help kickstart yourself into a thriftier way of life.
It may be that you want to start small and for you the right thrifty resolution might be to start meal planning, or to buy more things secondhand. Possibly to look on a price comparison site and see if you can get a better deal on your utilities bill. Or, if you’re someone that’s pretty thrifty already then you might decide that you’re going to buy nothing new for a whole year.
I’m going to settle somewhere in the middle though in 2016 and I plan to take on the 52 Week Saving Challenge.
As the name suggests this is a challenge where you aim to save every week throughout the year – hopefully so that come Christmas you have a nice pot to dip into to pay for the festive season. Now the thing I really like about the 52 week savings challenge is that it seems like the year is broken up into manageable chunks, yet the result at the end of the year is impressive.
In week 1 you just need to save a pound. Yep, just £1. In week 2 this goes up to £2. £3 in week 3 and so on. By the end of the year you’ll have a whopping £1,378 saved.
Or, if you think that it would be easier to kick start with the higher numbers you could put away £52 in week 1, then £51 in week 2 and so on. The total at the end of the year will be the same, but you’ll have the added bonus of knowing that the challenge will get easier as the year goes on. This way round it also mean that by week 25 you’ll already have £1,000 in your savings. How satisfying will that feel?
If you think that your income will fluctuate a lot throughout the year then another option is to just save as much as you can each week and simply cross off the corresponding amount on your savings table. One week you might manage £20, the next just £2, but again it will all add up to the same fantastic total of £1,378.
What I would say really works though is having a visual reminder of how far you’ve come since the beginning of the year, so do keep a record somewhere, whether it be a nice singing and dancing spreadsheet or just a piece of paper on front of the fridge. It’s so much more motivating when you can see your savings adding up.
I’ve created a couple of savings tables to help those of you that are planning to follow the saving up or saving down methods and you can download and print them out from here: 52 Week Saving Challenge.
This is an interesting idea, but it might also be worth mentioning another idea I saw on line, which is to move the decimal point and save in pennies rather than pounds. I am a stay at home mum who has started freelance admin, and I have yet to earn more than £200 a month, as I don’t want to work too many hours and be away from my daughter. That is to buy my clothes, toiletries, get my hair cut, buy the odd magazine, etc. Basically anything that isn’t essential comes out of that money. So the idea of saving £52 a week is entirely out of my reach. I’m guessing those interested in thrift may sometimes be interested from necessity and in a similar position.