As I mentioned a couple days ago, one of my goals is to save
more money. I thought I’d share a couple ways we are going to do this. First,
we already have savings accounts set up with automatic deposits every other
week. Those are for the kids’ college fund. We will keep those going. Last
year, we kind of started this silly thing of saving every $5 bill we have. It
doesn’t seem like much but over a matter of a few months, we managed to save
almost $400 and we usually don’t have a lot of cash on hand. So we will still
do that as well. To help give us incentive to save those $5 bills, we started
an allowance for all of us. Don’t laugh – hear me out! My son gets an allowance
for his chores each day. Depending on his behavior/attitude, he gets $0.20 per
chore and has the opportunity for at least 6 chores a day. If he does them, he
gets money. If he doesn’t, no monies for him! My husband and I are a little
different. Obviously, we do the brunt of the housework, cooking, etc so it’s
not really an allowance. I noticed that we spend less overall if we use cash
instead of cards. So each Monday, I go get some cash and split it up between us
(about $40 a week or so). If we have something we want or can’t live without,
we use our allowance. Whatever is left goes in the “stash” for another day. I
like this idea but I’m thinking of modifying it a bit. By far our biggest
expense is food right now. We are making a lot of new adjustments and trying to
figure out what will work with our diets. I will tell you that eating healthy
is more expensive and eating organic or whole foods are even worse. That is why
we have weekly meal plans. In order to have fresh produce on hand (real foods),
we typically buy groceries once a week. I don’t have a problem with this, but I
always end up going grocery shopping hungry and buying junk. So my goal is to
only go big time pantry, freezer shopping once a month and if we need to go
produce shopping weekly, that’s fine. If this works, our allowance amounts,
etc. may change. You need a little entertainment or splurge every once in a
while but we are going to try and minimize that. In addition to those ideas, we
are also going to do a weekly savings that will be used to restock our savings
from last year’s bills and maybe a nice little family treat (weekend getaway or
something). Here’s the breakdown of all our savings plans:
- Bi-monthly savings deposits for each savings account = $75 x 26 weeks = $1,950.00 a year
- Miscellaneous $5 bill savings (estimated) $5 per week x 52 weeks = $260.00 a year
- Increasing weekly savings (See chart below = total of $2,756.00 a year
WOW! If you did that for 10 years (without
increase), you’ve just saved almost $50,000!
