Pay Yourself First
The concept of the challenge is pretty simple. There are 365 days in the year. Each day before you go out, you need to pay yourself first. That is vital. Paying yourself first means that you don’t have to worry about that later.
The second important point is that until paying yourself first becomes a habit; it needs to be extremely easy to do. It takes 21 days to form a habit, so it’s important to make saving as easy as possible for those first three weeks.
How Does the Challenge Work?
Each morning when you get up, you need to pay yourself some amount before you do anything. The payment can be anywhere between a penny to $3.65. Once you’ve made that payment to yourself, you “x” out the box on your chart. The next payment the following morning can be any of the remaining amounts on the diagram. You do this each and every morning for the entire year. When you are done, you will have saved $667.95. Even better, you will have started the habit of paying yourself first which will be an asset for the rest of your life.
There are a couple of necessary steps that go along with the challenge. After printing out the challenge sheet, you need to place it somewhere where you will see it every morning. The bathroom or your room is fine. It needs to be visible so that it’s in your face each morning.
The second thing is that you need to make the payment each morning physically. You need to go to your purse or wallet and place the amount you decide to pay yourself that day into a jar that is specifically for this challenge. That payment is significant. It will benefit you in the future.
There are two advantages to this challenge over the 52-week money challenge for those who struggled to get their finances in order. The first is that you’re starting with small amounts that anyone, no matter what their current financial situation can participate in. If all you can do is pay the minimum amount each day for the first month, you’re only out of $4.65 for three days. There should be nothing holding you back.
The second main advantage is the challenge is done daily. It requires you to think about saving every day. Even though the amount that needs to be saved isn’t that much, the process of thinking about it will cross your mind each morning as you pay yourself. By the end of the 365 days, paying yourself and saving money each day will be a natural part of your day. When you are only thinking about saving once a week, it can turn into a situation where saving money is only thought about at the last minute at the end of the week, and the process never gets instilled as a habit.
Use a Money-Saving App as an Alternative to automatic savings. If you want to save money using an app, Digit.co is perfect for that. It is easy to install. Just sign up here and then Digit will do the rest. What i does it that it directly analyzes your savings account balances and automatically does small withdrawals directly to your savings account. You won’t even notice that it does this little savings until you see your savings accounts expanding. Check it out at Digit.
Jason Butler is an Atlanta native, as well as businessman, blogger and teacher. Not only is Jason a prolific flipper, marketer, writer and side hustler his number of years in higher education and student support have given him expert knowledge in understanding the economics of the student loan industry.