30 day challenge

30 Day Money Saving Challenge: Save $100 in One Month with Quarters

January 11, 2019 By Jeffrey Strain 4 Comments

Now that the new year is underway, people across the country are striving to make their resolutions a reality. If your goal is to increase your emergency savings (or even start your first emergency savings account), a quick money challenge can be an excellent option. While popular approaches like the 52-Week and 365-Day challenges are great choices, they do require a full year commitment. If you want to start with something shorter, this 30-day money saving challenge might be right for you.

How to Save $100 in a 30 Days

If you want to start slow or simply have a need for a quick $100, you can painlessly get the money you need with a 30-day quarter challenge. This approach is great for individuals who are living paycheck to paycheck, as the daily deposits never exceed $7.50.

On day one, deposit $0.25 in your savings account, the value of one quarter. Then, on day two, you deposit two quarters instead of one, making your deposit into your savings account $0.50 and bringing your balance up to $0.75.

As you proceed with the challenge, you just add $0.25, or one quarter, to the deposit amount from the previous day. On day 10, your deposit will be $2.50. On day 20, you’ll reach $5.00. Finally, your day 30 deposit is only $7.50.

You can also remember the amount by recognizing that the number of quarters you deposit matches the day of the challenge. For example, on day 10, you would deposit 10 quarters, which have a value of $2.50.

At the end of the challenge, you’ll have $116.25 in your account. Plus, if you put the money in a high-yield savings account, you might even earn a little bit of interest too.

If you would rather do the challenge in cash, you can place the appropriate number of quarters into a jar at home instead. However, you won’t earn any interest this way, and you might have to wrap up your change in rolls before depositing it into a savings account.

Want to Save $500 in 30 Days Instead?

If you want to challenge yourself, and pull together almost $500 instead of $100, then use dollars instead of quarters. On day one, deposit $1.00. Then, deposit $2.00 on day two, $3.00 on day three, and so on until you finish the 30 days.

At the end of a 30-day dollar challenge, you’ll have $465 in the bank. Plus, your largest deposit is just $30, the cost of a single fast food meal for many families of four.

Benefits of the 30-Day Money Saving Challenge

While the biggest benefit of completing the 30-day challenge is increasing the balance in your savings account, you also get more out of it than that. Along the way, you are setting good savings habits, helping you create a solid financial cushion in case of an emergency.

Plus, there is nothing to say that you have to stop after 30 days. You could always keep going, increasing your deposit by $0.25 each day until you reach a particular savings goal or hit the end of the year. Alternatively, if you are living paycheck to paycheck, you can start over each month, using the date to guide the size of your deposit. That way, your largest daily deposit never exceeds $7.75, making it much more manageable for anyone with a tight budget.

Consider Money Saving Apps

A great way to supplement your savings is the automated approach with an application like digit.co

Simply sign up and let the program analyze your checking account. The app will then make automated withdrawals which don’t impact your spending and sweeps them to an account you control. It is a super easy way to save money without a lot of effort. Click here to check it out.

In either case, you are creating an easy way to bolster your savings, ensuring that you have a health emergency fund in place at all times.

Do you have a tip for saving $100 a month? Share it in the comments below.

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30 Day Create a Money Saving Habit Challenge

January 8, 2015 By Jeffrey Strain 5 Comments

When it comes to New Year’s resolutions and wanting to save more money, many people fail to take the first important step to make sure the resolution is accomplished. They don’t take the time to form a habit of saving money. Think about it. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, and you don’t have an emergency fund, a big reason is you have never formed the habit of saving money. Until you form this new habit, you’re going to have a difficult time accomplishing the goal of saving your target amount for the year.

The different types of money challenges are helpful in this regard since most of them require you to save money over a period of time long enough for you to form a money saving habit. For example, the 52-week money saving challenge has you saving some amount of money 52 times during the course of a year. The 365-day money challenge has you doing the same thing for 365 straight days. Even the 30-day money challenge will help you form the habit. There is just one pitfall all of these challenges have. They designate an amount you have to save before you have established the saving money habit.

While the conventional wisdom is that it takes 21 days to form a new habit, new research says that it can take anywhere from 18 days to 254 days depending on the complexity of the habit you’re trying to instill into your daily routine. That is until doing something is routine rather than you having to force yourself to do it. How long it will take for you to form the saving money habit will vary from person to person, but most people will be well on their way after 30 days. If you still don’t feel the habit of putting a little money away is routine, then do it for another 30 days until it does. Once it does become routine, you can then challenge yourself to try and save larger amounts than you have been.

The key difference of the 30 days create a saving money habit challenge as compared to the other money challenges out there is that there is no pressure to save a certain amount each day. The focus is on creating the habit. It doesn’t matter if you put in a penny or a hundred dollar bill, as long as you save something. The goal should be to save as much as you can, but the most important aspect is you take the action of saving money each day.

For that reason, it’s important that you create a saving money container where you will place some amount of money each day. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy. An old jar or can do. You’ll also need to print out the challenge sheet (you can do this by clicking on the image at the top of this article), and place them together in a spot where you can’t miss them each day. It’s good to choose a time when you will add money to the container (each morning or each evening) since this consistency will make it easier to form the habit. Again, the amount you save isn’t nearly as important as physically putting money into the savings container each and every day.

Once you add money, mark it on your challenge sheet. Do this on a daily basis and soon you’ll have formed the habit. In addition, you will want to open up a separate banking account specifically to deposit the money you save. You can choose how often you deposit, but making it consistent will help (every Friday or the last day of each month). This is important to make sure the money goes towards savings, and it doesn’t get mixed up with your other money and is accidentally spent on something else because the money was in the same account.

If you have tried money challenges in the past and failed, give this a try. Once you have the habit created, you’ll be in a position to conquer any of the other money challenges, and you’ll also have a good idea of what you can save, taking into account your current financial situation.

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Save Nearly $500 with the 30 Day Money Challenge

January 6, 2015 By Jeffrey Strain 4 Comments

Save $465 with the 30 day money challenge

One of the main issues some people have with the 52 week money challenge is the length of time it takes to save the money. That challenge is a year long commitment, and there are some who would rather focus on saving money in a shorter period of time. For those people, the 30 Day Money Challenge may be the perfect solution (click on the image above to print out the challenge).

Build Good Habits with the 30 Day Money Challenge

The challenge works in the same way as the 52 week money challenge, but instead of spreading out over 52 weeks, it’s done in a period of one month. On the first day you save $1, on day two you save $2 and on day three you save $3. You continue doing this on a daily basis until you reach day 30, when you save $30. By following this schedule, at the end of the month you’ll have saved $465. Even better, you will have established a solid savings habit that you can use to save even more money during the following months if you decide to.

Find Your “Hurt Point”

One of the big advantages of the 30 day money challenge over the 52 week money challenge and the 356 day money challenge is that you’ll learn where your savings “hurt point” is much more quickly. That is, when the amount you’re saving turns from being easy to being a struggle to save.

While it may be easy to save $1 the first day, there is going to come a point during the 30 days when you realize saving a certain amount is difficult (or impossible). Finding out this hurt point quickly shouldn’t be seen as a failure of the challenge, but a great piece of information so that you can develop a challenge that works the best for you. While it could take months to find out the hurt point on the 52 week challenge, you’ll know what it is in less than a month with the 30 day money challenge.

The 30 Day Money Challenge is Highly Flexible

Another great aspect of the challenge is it doesn’t need to be done at the beginning of the year. You have 12 opportunities each year to begin as each new month gives you another chance to work at the challenge. You may want to do it 12 times in a row, or you may have certain months when you feel you have a better opportunity of completing the challenge. It gives you a bit more flexibility throughout the year to save during the times you’re most motivated.

The shortened period of time also doesn’t make the challenge appear to last forever. Many people have trouble focusing on something for an entire year, while they don’t have as much of a problem remaining engaged for 30 days. While this isn’t true for everyone, those who like to focus on shorter periods of time may find this money saving challenge geared more toward the way they like to save money.

The 30 Day Money Challenge is simply an alternative way to save money which will appeal to a certain group who want to begin saving. If it sounds like it would be a better fit than the other challenges out there, give it a go. As with all these challenges, the most important aspect is finding something that works for you so you can turn saving money into a lifetime habit.

For those of you who feel this might be too ambitious to begin with, you can also try the 30 day quarter challenge which uses the same principle, and will net you just over $100 after 30 days.

Supplement With Passive Savings

The past few years have been great for automated savings apps. A couple of good options you should check out are digit.co and acorns.com. Between the two, digit.co is certainly the most well known. This is because it is pretty much the ideal passive savings tool. You just create an account and let digit.co read your checking account’s transaction information. Digit will deduct a small amount – not enough to bounce any checks – and will sweep the results into an account you control. Pretty much all you need to do is sit back and watch the savings build up. Click here to learn more.