Update on the 52 Week Money Saving Challenge

About this time last year, I stumbled upon a rather easy method to save an extra $1,378 over the course of a year by completing the 52 week money saving challenge. You simply took the week number of the year and placed that the equivalent number of dollars into a jar. So during week 1 of the year, you place a $1; week 2 = $2. By the last week of the year, you place $52 into the jar.

The 52 week money saving challenge is a quick way to build up cash with small denominations.

My wife and I both vowed to do the challenge last year, and each had a fancy jar where we stored the cash. If we both completed the challenge, we would have over $2,600 “extra” dollars at our disposal.

During the early part of the year, the process was simple. Take a couple quick dollars out of our wallets and place them into a jar. Painless, and I even updated a weekly symbol on the side of my blog before we rolled out the new redesign. This trained my mind that I needed to make a deposit into our jars because I constantly saw weekly that I needed to update the reminder on our site, which showed the progress.

However, here is where the process broke down for our family.

1) Like any challenge (diet, money, addiction), one needs to constantly be reminded of the goal. It is easy to order up the cheese covered veal Parmesan when going out to eat. Just as so with the 52 week money saving challenge, the money jar needs to be front and center to remind one that you need to keep saving.

That being said, we had rather decorative jars where we stored our money. However, the problem became seeing those jars to remember. During the early part of the year, it was not a big deal to remember to drop your weekly allowance into the jars. However, as the year progressed, and we would have people over to the house, there was no good place to set the jars out to remind you, while also keeping from flashing your guests hundreds of dollars in cash.

So the jars ended up in kitchen cupboards, concealed. Even placing the jars into cupboards we frequented (i.e. the drinking cup area) was not the most convenient location to remind us of our new saving habit.

2) The hardest part for both my wife and I is we carry very little cash. My wife is lucky she heads to the bank once a year, and thus it became rather cumbersome to always remind her to make a deposit into the jars. Rather than weekly deposits, she got into the habit of making monthly deposits to play catch-up to where the jar total was supposed to align with the week.

I tend to manage all the finances of the family, and thus frequently have to make cash withdraws to cover babysitting or move cash around from accounts at various banks. So meeting the weekly jar requirements was not as much of a hassle for me.

3) Speaking of needing cash on hand. We found more often then not, the 52 week money saving challenge jars happened to be a good bank to dip into. Oh, I forgot to get money for the babysitter today, so I will borrow it from the jars. Or the neighbor kid is here selling some fundraiser items, so let me go grab the cash from the jar. Or the ice cream truck is driving down the street and the boys are panting at the window for a Sponge Bob Popsicle. Stealing from the jars became a constant balancing act of having to refund the challenge the cash we borrowed.

So what happened with our 52 week money saving challenge?

About three-quarters through the year (approximately August), having cash on hand all the time started to become a constant hassle. Even in little denominations, having to scrap up an extra $30 each to place into our jars for the week quickly got lost in our families other priorities.

So our family admits defeat to the 52 week money saving challenge. Simple in theory, but like anything, took a lot of maintenance to execute.

Was there things we could have done differently? Sure. However, with constant bills piling up, I quickly shifted the extra cash into paying down debt instead. Having less debt is surely a great thing, but it still feels deflating knowing we could not meet the obligations of our saving challenge.

How were your results of the 52 week money saving challenge?

Save Money, Travel More!

Source: InACents