money.usnews.com
In the beginning of the year I as bombarded like you with posts all over Twitter, Facebook & IG about a 52 week Savings challenge, where people were planning to save a dollar based on the week number in the year. For example week 1 they save $1, week 52, they save $52. This method seems noble enough, but is entirely too blasé for me. Savings a mere $1300 by year’s end just didn’t seem to get the fire burning under my butt to save. I wanted something way more challenging, that would force me to stretch and be creative and some days even eat raman noodles (yuck)
I decided to create my own 52 Week Savings Plan, you can read more about it by clicking HERE! My goal is to save $1000 per month, for 12 months.. tax returns don’t count, bonus checks don’t count, but I’ve committed to saving $1000 out of my take home salary per month. Of course this challenge isn’t for everyone; you need one of 2 things in order to participate, an income that allows you to commit such funds OR a commitment to significantly reducing your expenses. I am currently a combination of both strategies working together, as I would assume most people who are participating in this challenge would be also.
In my particular case high income and a family also comes with lots of expenses. We have rent, a car payment, student loans, insurance, child care, groceries, cell phones etc etc etc…It all adds up and fast, especially living in NYC! And as the primarily supporter of a family of 6 it definitely isn’t easy.
My husband took the leap last year to become self employed so he doesn’t work a traditional 9-5p anymore, as he continues to build his clients and his income, we also decided he would do school pick up to keep our older girls out of after school (an expense would which would have topped out our child care costs at over $2000 a month). So he is fully committed to being DADDY by day and Sound Engineer and DJ at night!
When deciding to create and fulfill this challenge we knew there are only 2 ways to fund our goal, increase our income or cut our expenses. Since it isn’t necessarily easy to just increase your income overnight, here’s what we did to be able to save $1000 a month with the income we already bring in.
OUR PATH TO $1000 IN SAVINGS
1. We cut our cable. With technology evolving so quickly we couldn’t really understand why the price of cable kept going up. Our bill was always hovering around $115. So we bought APPLE TV for a 1 time fee of $99, buy your own here Apple TV MC572LL/A (2nd Generation)
2. I Brown Bag It! As the one who commutes and is away from home all day, I committed to bringing breakfast and lunch to work daily. I had already started this in 2012 with a cheat day budget every Friday of $10, but I decided to even take away my Fridays. New monthly cost? $0 Savings $50
3. We Cut Our Childcare. Our childcare costs with a new addition in the family went from $750 a month to $1050 a month to $1350 by November 2012. To slash that budget we took our big girls out of After School, our 4 year old out of private school and now we only have costs for the in-house nanny of our baby. New monthly cost? $750 Savings $600!!
Boom! $750 for savings found in the same exact budget we always had..So we haven’t hit our $1000 target yet but we plan to paying off our car payment by May 2013 which will free up the $250 we need to make our goal and there will still be extra leftover which will most likely be strategically invested!
Want to join the challenge? I created a pilot group on Facebook, called The 52 Week $12,000 Savings Challenge, <–CLICK it’s a group of 10 motivated ladies who are oh so focused on getting their finances right for 2013, it’s became a safe haven for us to talk money, debt payoff and our goals for the future! Some have accepted the challenge at half staff, meaning they are only participating at $500 a month and thus far we are all moving in the right direction and building a nice little pot for ourselves!
Could you find the money in your budget to commit to a money challenge?? What are you willing to go without?
xoxo
Carrie
Related posts: