America Saves Week is a great idea to help us focus more on saving for both short-term goals (summer vacation) and long-term goals (retirement). In fact, you can join over 350,000 others to pledge to save more this year. Find out more about how you can participate at America Saves Week. It’s a fun app that will even send you text messages if you want to receive savings tips and advice.
By nature, I tend to be a saver. But, with all of the monthly expenses (It really costs that much to heat our house in the winter?!), all the things we must have (i-Phones. Are they really a must-have?), and all the things we want to do (I’ve been bitten by the travel bug!), I was finding it challenging to save ahead of spending. It is just so easy to pull out that credit card on vacation, then be shocked a month later when the bill comes due.
Any ideas I had heard related to trading off expenses just weren’t sustainable. If I stopped buying coffee and made my own, I could save $2.50 a day. Or if I packed my lunch just 2 days a week I could save from $10 – $20 a week. These are good ideas and not too painful. But, they were hard to implement because it caused a change in my routine. And, even if I did skip coffee one or two days a week, I never moved $2.50 into the “vacation account.”
Saving for retirement has been a top priority for years and we have a disciplined approach for that. But, spending for vacations and the holidays was, frankly, out of control. I needed something more effective. That’s when I thought about techniques that worked with children: rewards and bribery. Why not give it a try? I decided to try bribing myself to save in advance for future travel. Here’s the scoop:
• I love to order out for dinner. In fact, “dining out” is the largest category of our monthly spending.
• I used to love to cook, but after 30 years of making dinners I was tired of the planning, shopping, cooking and clean up, especially after a long day in the office.
• But, I really want to travel more than eat out.
• What if I bribe myself with cash to cook again?
And so, the idea was born. For every night that I make a homemade meal, I would pay myself $20. That seems like a good estimate for how much extra I would have paid to grab take-out for the family. I use my big family calendar to mark the days that I make dinner at home – “d@h” gets penciled in each day that I cook. At the end of the month, I count up the days I’ve cooked and reward myself with the total savings for the month. Literally, I transfer several hundred dollars from my checking account into the savings account “travel” bucket. Money that I would have spent at my favorite Chinese restaurant, I now spend it on me!
My best month so far earned $480 toward travel. That was 24 homemade dinners! By the end of the year, it is highly possible that I’ll have saved $5,000. That will be a really nice amount for a summer vacation…all because I got back into the kitchen again.
Find where you can make a change that you can stick with – and pay yourself. Create your own bribery and reward system. Most important, you must actually move the money into your reward bucket! Let me know what you come up with…
