Money Saving Challenges to Make Saving Fun

If you struggle with saving money like many of us do, you may be searching for some fun and creative ways to help you save. Creating money-saving habits takes some work, but it can be made much easier if you turn it into a fun challenge! Lately, money-saving challenges have become a popular way for regular people to develop better spending habits. Many times, the biggest deterrent to saving money is not a lack of money; rather, it is not having the right mindset about saving money. Help yourself save more money by trying one of these unique money-saving challenges!

52-Week Money-Saving Challenge

This is one of the oldest money-saving challenges out there and one of the easiest to stick to! The way this challenge works is you set an amount to save each week and then save that amount for 52 weeks, or one year.

If you save $5 per week, you will have a total of $260 at the end of the year; while this is a nice chunk of change, it is not a significant amount of money. If you double this and manage to save $10 per week, you will end up with $520 at the end of the year, which is enough for some bills or Christmas shopping. If you want to take the challenge further, you might try and save $100 per week for a total of $5,200 at the end of the year, which is enough for a vacation or a down payment on a new car!

Some people create variations of this challenge. One of the more popular twists on this challenge is to start by saving $1 the first week and then increasing your weekly savings by $1 until you are saving $52 per week by the end. If you do this, you will save $1,378 by the end of the year!

No Spend Challenge

This challenge is more fun than it may sound at first. The focus of this challenge is not to spend any money for a set amount of time. This might be a day, weekend, or a whole week if you are feeling ambitious. Of course, there are some exceptions to the no spend rule. You still need to pay for bills and all essential items such as food, but you should try to avoid eating out and making any unnecessary purchases. This will also help you decide if the thing you want to buy is really needed. By making yourself wait to purchase things, you have more time to think if you really need or want them.

The Pantry Challenge

This challenge is designed to help you save money on groceries and be more creative in the kitchen. You don’t buy any food for the pantry challenge until you have made everything you possibly can from the food you currently have in your pantry, fridge, and freezer. This is a great challenge for using up food before it goes bad, cleaning out your cabinets, and finding new and creative recipes.

Keep All the Change

Most people probably utilize some version of this challenge every day. Keep all of your change you get from purchases and store it in a designated jar and then cash out the jar at the end of the year. You will be surprised at how much your loose change adds up to at the end of the year!