timeforanatterSaving without even noticing
As someone who acquired the nickname ‘Thrifty Pence’, I’m pretty savvy when it comes to saving money and reducing waste. I’ve been taught by my family how to be thrifty with things and sensible with money and love the challenge of living well on a shoestring. My husband and I are shortly both going to be self-employed and this is both an exciting and nerve-wracking development. Our money needs to work as hard as it possibly can and I’ve been masterminding ways to reduce our bills and pay off the mortgage as quickly as possible.
The challenge
I recently began ‘The 1p challenge’. It’s where you basically save loose change every day for a year starting with 1p and increasing the amount by 1p every day e.g. Day 1 = 1p, Day 2 = 2p, Day 3 = 3p and so on. By day 365 you’ll have saved £667.95. We intend on using the money for a mortgage over payment and plan to add to it as we can afford it rather than stick to a daily addition as sometimes it just might not be realistic to put that much aside.
Lots of people have created printable charts so you can check off the amounts each day or as you add the change to your jar so just search and print one-off. There’s a really good one on Skint Dad’s blog which actually gives running totals too. We intend to save it as fast as we can and then start again.
We’ve found it motivating to have the chart as a visual cue for our progress so that it’s not just a random amount of money in a jar that looks like a million copper coins. I think it’s actually deceptive how much money you can accumulate from what is loose change that just sits in your purse as you break into notes.
Fancy giving it a go yourself? Let me know what you think you would spend the money on!