Tag Archives: accountability

I WON! I WON!

Mission Accomplished!
Mission Accomplished!

For the first time EVER, I completed the 52 Week Money Challenge! You can see in the left sidebar that my meter is back down to a measly $3… but that only gives me a great feeling of relief; my last payment to my Money Challenge account in December of 2015 was $103. That’s a bit of a tough go when I make minimum wage, believe me.

I did it, though! I’m REALLY proud of myself, too!

Did you take the money challenge with me in 2015? Will you take it with me this year?

It works like this: Week 1: you pay $1 into a separate savings account (or a jar, a sock in your dresser drawer, under your mattress…) – I put mine into a high-interest tax-free savings account, where it sat there looking very, very small. Actually I put $3 in there on the first payday of January 2015, since I’m paid on a bi-weekly basis. The reason it worked out to $3 is that on Week 2 you add a dollar… and then on Week 3, you save $4… etc. etc.

At the end of 52 weeks, if you’ve been keeping up your promise to pay yourself, you’ll have a whopping $1373 in that account, not including any interest you’ve accrued. I know it doesn’t sound like all that much to save in a year – but it’s $1373 that I didn’t have earning interest at this time last year (and I have a really neat plan for that money, believe me!).

I actually have $1,389.28 in that account. I started out with $10 already in there, as I had originally planned on putting $10 from every paycheck away, just to see if I could do it. My savings habits have been habitually DISMAL for my entire life – I had failed the Money Challenge for the two years previous, before I even got to February, but I decided to give it one last go, using this blog as an accountability tool. Turned out, I didn’t update very often – but I kept putting money in that account every single payday… even when I was laid off in the middle of January 2015 (I kind of had to play catch up after I finally found work two and a half months later, but I DID catch up).

The rest of the money in that account is $6.20 worth of interest – again not much, but it will grow exponentially as my balance grows – I plan to use the same account and the high interest will begin to be worth it as my balance gets up there.

That’s not all I’ve been doing with my money during 2015 – I’ll be giving more detail in future posts as to where my money really goes as well as how my “Prepaid Living Plans” are working out. I have several resolutions this year – one being updating this space on a more regular basis – at least with a weekly “Accountability Post”. It’s hard to prove I’m serious about my Shoestring Budget when I rarely update, isn’t it?

Anyway – I really hope you’ll join me in the 2016 52 Week Money Challenge. If *I* can do it, ANYBODY can!

The Simple Dollar has come up with 6 Ways to Hack the 52-Week Money Challenge that you may want to check out!