In the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, there’s been a renewed emphasis placed on saving. Americans have learned the hard way that sometimes a rainy day can last for months or even years.
A survey conducted in early 2022 found that Americans were trying to increase their savings by an average of $5,710. A little more than four in ten respondents wanted to build up an emergency fund while 31 percent wanted to pay off credit card debt and 27 percent wanted to save up for a vacation.
No matter what your reason is for saving money, it’s going to require a lot of personal sacrifices. You’ll have to cut back on your expenses and that can often mean having less fun. Fortunately, there’s one way that you can still have fun as you save, but we’ll get back to that later on.
In the meantime, let’s focus on some of the more traditional methods of saving money.
How Much Money Should You Be Saving Each Month?
Everyone has a unique financial situation and different circumstances in their lives. That makes it a little difficult to establish a blanket amount that you should save each month. However, most experts recommend that you follow the 50/30/20 budget.
The general idea is that you spend 50 percent of your monthly income on things that you need, 30 percent on things that you want, and the remaining 20 percent on savings and paying down debt. For example, let’s say that you make $5,000 a month after taxes. Following the 50/30/20 budget would mean:
- $2,500 is dedicated to essential aspects of living such as housing, utilities, groceries, and transportation.
- $1,500 is dedicated to desirable aspects of living such as dining out, entertainment, and clothes shopping.
- $1,000 is dedicated to paying down any existing debt, creating an emergency fund, or saving for retirement.
You can probably see that this model provides a lot of opportunities to increase your savings. Spending 30 percent of your monthly income on things that you want might be fun, but it’s not very practical when you’re trying to save. Cutting back on needless expenses is the fastest way for you to save up money.
What Are The Best Money Saving Challenges?
- 52-week Challenge
- Roll the Dice Challenge
- Penny a Day Challenge
- 8-week Vacation Challenge
- Bowl Grab Challenge
- 30-day No-spend Challenge
There are countless challenges being issued to people all across social media. Regardless of your preferred social media, you’re likely to be bombarded with various challenges involving ice buckets, blindfolds, or laundry detergent.
The majority of these challenges are simply ways for people to entertain each other. However, there are a few that are intended to help you save money. Here is a list of the most effective money saving challenges:
52-week Challenge
The “52-week” challenge functions like the opposite of an Advent calendar. Instead of receiving a candy prize at the start of each day, you’d be investing money into your savings each week.
In other words, you’d invest $1 during the first week of January. You would increase the amount to $2 during the following week. You would continue to add a dollar to the total every week until you reached $52 during the last week of December.
Continuing this weekly investment pattern will eventually add up to $1,378 at the end of the year. Another way to perform this challenge is to go the opposite way.
Start off with an initial deposit of $52 and work your way down. You’d already have $200 in savings by the end of January and it would only get easier from there.
Roll the Dice Challenge
The “roll the dice” challenge is probably the most fun option on this list because it’s something of a game. Every day, you’ll roll a single six-sided die and deposit that amount into your savings account. That’s all there is to it.
Rolling a one would be a single dollar, a two would be two dollars, and so on. While that might not sound like a lot of money, it will add up faster than you might think. By the end of a month, you’ll have saved somewhere between $30 and $180. By the end of the year, it’ll be between $365 and $2,190.
Of course, you can always use a die that has more sides if you’re looking to make even bigger deposits. It’s not very hard to find dice that have eight, 10, 12, or even 20 sides. You could wind up saving several thousand dollars by using one of these dice.
Penny a Day Challenge
The “penny a day” challenge is an easy way to find out how much a penny can eventually be worth. You’ll deposit a single penny into your savings on the first day of the challenge. The next day will be two pennies. The day after that will be three pennies. You get the idea. The final deposit will be $3.65.
Believe it or not, the penny-saving challenge will end up netting you $667.95 in additional savings. If that’s not enough for you, then you can bump up the challenge to the next level.
Replacing pennies with nickels will result in $3,339.75 in savings at the end of the year.
8-week Vacation Challenge
The “eight-week vacation” challenge gets its name because it was designed as a savings plan to quickly afford a trip. You don’t have to use the money on vacation unless that’s your reason for saving in the first place. This challenge is unique because it has two distinct phases: saving and scaling back.
The saving phase includes the first four weeks requiring you to save $10, $25, $75, and $150. The second four weeks is the opposite as you’ll save $150, $75, $25, and $10. The grand total of savings will be $520, but that’s just the first part.
The scaling back phase requires you to eliminate one restaurant meal and two coffee shop visits each week. Prices vary but that should respectively save you an extra $50 and $10 a week. The scaling back total should equal about $480, leaving you with $1,000 saved in just eight weeks.
Bowl Grab Challenge
The “bowl grab” challenge is another way to add a playful spin to save. You’ll need to get enough scraps of paper for each day of the month. Write down different amounts of money that equal the amount you want to save. For example, if you wanted to save $100 in April, then you’d write out 20 $1 slips, 8 $5 slips, and two $20 slips.
Fold these slips up, put them in a bowl, and draw one every day. Deposit the amount that you draw into your savings account. By the end of the month, you’ll have drawn every slip and saved up the total amount that you wanted.
30-day No-Spend Challenge
The “30-day no-spend” challenge is definitely one of the more difficult challenges on this list. It’s the financial equivalent of going on a crash diet for 30 days. Both of them will take a lot of discipline and sacrifice, but you’ll surely be satisfied with the results in the end.
The rules of this challenge are pretty simple: you can’t spend any extra money for the entire month. You’re only allowed to pay for the absolute necessities such as housing, food, utilities, and gas. That means no dining out with friends, no new clothes, no night at the movies, and no coffee on the way to work.
So if you follow the 50/30/20 budget mentioned earlier, that means that you’d be saving at least 50 percent of your income for the month. That’s a lot of money saved, but you shouldn’t underestimate how difficult it will be. You might want to start with a seven-day no-spend challenge first and work your way up to 30 days.
Is Yotta a Good Way To Save Money?
Yotta isn’t technically a money-saving challenge, but it might be more effective than any of them out there. Yotta is actually a bank account option that operates in the same way as your current bank or credit union. The key difference is how Yotta pays out interest.
Most banks offer a very small interest rate that’s meant to persuade you to keep your money deposited. These rates usually range between 0.01 percent and 0.03 percent. Depending on how much you have in your account, that might end up equaling a free cup of coffee each year. Yotta has a different way of paying interest and it could potentially change your life forever.
The way that it works is that you’ll get one ticket at the beginning of the week for every $25 in your account. A balance of $100 would get you four tickets, $1,000 would get you 40 tickets, and so on. You get the idea. There will be a nightly drawing at 9 PM EST and a total of seven numbers will be selected during the week.
Depending on how many numbers you match, you could win a few thousand dollars, a brand new Tesla Model 3, or possibly a $10 million prize. There’s no money-saving challenge on social media that can get you anywhere near that kind of money.
Start Saving Today
The best time to start saving is yesterday, but the second-best time is today. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of different money-saving challenges online. All you have to do is pick one that sounds fun, challenge yourself, and save up enough money for a rainy day.
It might be a good idea to store all of that saved money in a Yotta account. The more money that you have in your account, the more tickets that you’ll receive, and the better that your odds are of winning a $1 million jackpot. If that doesn’t motivate you to save more money each month, then there probably isn’t much that will.
Head over to Yotta today so that you can open an account and get started. It’ll be much easier to cut back on expenses when you start viewing every $25 purchase as a lost weekly ticket.
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