- Welcome to The Budget
Mom YouTube channel. I'm Kumiko Love from TheBudgetMom.com. Today we're talking about
a really fun subject. We're gonna be talking
about savings challenges, and not just ordinary savings challenges, but savings challenges that
are geared for smaller incomes and tighter budgets. (cheerful acoustic music) So the reason I wanted to do this video is because creating and
implementing savings challenges in my life has no, like I have no doubt that has led to a lot of my success when it comes to saving money, but not just with the
numbers and the values. It also helped me establish
a habit of savings. Now, I know a lot of the time when we think about saving money, we think about being able to save, you know, the most amount, the
biggest amount that we can, but that's really not
the benefit of savings. The benefit of savings is establishing a consistent habit in our lives to save, which then leads to us making saving a priority in our lives, which then leads to making savings a priority in our budgets, and that's our ultimate goal. So today we're gonna be talking about some savings challenges
that I have implemented throughout my life that in
the beginning of my journey was what I could afford to do. Now most people are under the impression if they have a really tight budget or they're working with a small income that they don't have the
capability, opportunity to save. And after kinda working
through this in my journey, my financial journey, I know
that's just not the case. So it's all about one: looking at where your dollars are going so you can find more discretionary
income in your budget to throw at things that matter to you. And sometimes that's our
savings goals, or it's debt. Now, keep in mind these savings challenges don't just have to go
towards savings goals. You can also use them to pay off debt and hit your debt goals as well. So we're gonna be talking about a couple of savings challenges. One is the $5 savings challenge that I'm currently on right now. I, yes, I am doing this
in my life right now even though my financial
situation has changed drastically over the last nine years. We're gonna be talking about the $300 12-Week Christmas
Savings Challenge, the 52-Week Savings Challenge that I have kinda tweaked to make it work for smaller budgets. And we're also gonna be talking about the Save the Change Challenge. So the first challenge I
want to talk about today is the $5 Challenge. Now the $5 Challenge is essentially saving every $5 that you come
across in a certain timeframe. Now, according to my trackers, I started this savings challenge in the middle of December of
2019, and I'm still goin'. My challenge to myself was to do this all the way through 2020. Now, this is a challenge
that is definitely I think geared towards
being an all-cash spender because you're saving $5 bills that you're coming across
throughout your challenge period. However, I also think it could work even if you don't, aren't
an all-cash spender. Maybe you get money for birthdays. Maybe you get money for different things that pop up throughout your life. It doesn't have to be a lot. It could just be a simple
challenge of saying, hey, when I see a $5
bill, I'm gonna save it. Now let's talk about the resources I use to complete this challenge. Every single thing, all the printables and
worksheets that you're seein' in today's video are available
in my free resource library. Yes, I'm giving them all to you for free. I wanna make sure that you
have the resources available to not only make these challenges fun, I want you to be able to see the progress. I want you to finally see that small action steps
still lead up to success and they still add up in big ways. So I have currently
saved $470 in $5 bills. Now I use a jar that looks like this. I got this jar from Amazon, and I'll link it in the
description of the video. This is just a chalk label. I just use a chalk marker for my jar. But the cool thing about this jar is there's no openings except for the top. You actually have to
break into this sucker when you're done. And for me, I thought that was really cool because I'm the type
of person that's like, oh, I'm gonna stop by McDonald's and get myself a Diet Coke and a Big Mac. I'll just take some of my fives out. I can't access these until I'm completely
done with the challenge. Now for me, that helps me. Maybe you might not like the idea of having to break a
jar to get to your cash. Any jar will do. Do you have a Mason jar
laying around your home? Maybe you have a food container, a jar, a pickle jar container. It could be anything, a dedicated space to save your $5 bills. This is the $5 Challenge. You can get the $5 Challenge Tracker in the free resource library. The next savings challenge
I wanna talk about is the Save the Change Challenge. I have been doing this since the very beginning of my journey, almost nine years ago, and I've continued to
do it every single year. And there's a couple of reasons why. Let's talk about why, first,, why I started
implementing this into my life. When I first started budgeting, I had barely enough money
after paying my bills for gas and food for my son. But at the same time, I had an internal struggle as a mom to want to save for my son's future. And for me, that looked
like college savings. So I started thinking of ways, how can I still take
action even in a small way to take care of some
of this underlying pull and feeling to take action on
saving for my son's future? So I started looking for ways in my budget on how I could make it work without actually changing my budget, without changing any numbers in my budget, and I thought using my spare change. Every single year, I
save all of my change. Now, of course, as an all-cash spender, I get a lot of change. I save them in little counting
jars that look like this. And I got these ones from Amazon, and you can see I turned it on. I have $46.93 cents in this jar. This is why I love the counting jars. Remember how I said in the
beginning of this video, I'm all about seeing your progress? I didn't want to just throw money in a jar and not have any clue on how much I saved. I wanna see that number grow. So how this jar works
is you literally put in, so I have a nickel, it counts the change for
you as you put it in. So what I do, just for making it easy, and sometimes I don't have the time to stick the money in the jar. I throw all of my change
into this clear glass bowl. And once every week I put it into my jar. Now that's what works
for me and my schedule. Maybe every day you
want to add to your jar, and that's completely okay. Now this is a perfect example of how saving small amounts
can add up, but not only that, it can give us peace of mind and ease our hearts a little bit knowing we're taking
small action on a goal that we may not be able to make a priority right now in our lives. Every year I save my change, and in November I bring all my change down to my credit union. I make a deposit into my checking account, and I write a check for his
529 College Savings Account. Every year I'm able to
do anywhere between 250 and $400 extra on top of what
I already do within my budget for his college fund. And if you're working with a
really, really tight budget where you feel like you have no extra room to pursue the things that you want to, which it might be a want, it might be saving for
a new purse you want. It might be saving for
some new basketball shoes for your kiddo. This will help with that. So this is the Save the Change Challenge. Let's talk about the $300
12-Week Christmas Challenge. Have you ever gotten close to Christmas, you know, a couple of
months out from Christmas and you're like, oh my
gosh, I don't feel like I have enough saved, or I'm not fully prepared for what's about to hit me? Especially 'cause around Christmas, we're hit with so many
things like Cyber Monday and Black Friday. Maybe you have your Christmas
savings already saved up, but you're thinking, you know what? There's some things that I want
to get during Black Friday. You can use this challenge
for this as well. The great thing about this challenge is it only takes 12 weeks, so if you get really close to Christmas and you still feel like
you need to save more or haven't started saving,
you want something saved, his is a great challenge. The other great challenge
is it's not asking you to completely deplete
your income doing it. So what it is is every single
week, there's 12 weeks, you're gonna save a certain dollar amount. Do you notice these dollar
amounts are very doable? All of us can say, hey, let's decrease
our food budget by $25, or it can be another
category in our budget that we can challenge
ourselves to decrease one month to get that $25. Now the amounts fluctuate every week. You can see on week one, saving $25. Week two is saving $20. Maybe you sell some clothes
that you no longer need or use, and you wanna use that for this challenge. That's fine as well, but
the amounts are very small. It's not like it's a hundred, $200 a week. Every single time you
complete week, the weeks, you would just check off the box. At the end of the 12 weeks, you will have $300 to use
towards that Christmas spending. This worksheet is available
in the free resource library. And like I said, I'll put a link to this in
the description of the video. The next savings challenge
I wanna talk about is the 52-Week Money Saving Challenge. Now, if you look this up on Google, this savings challenge probably has a hundred different variations. So I created my own that does really well
with working with smaller or tighter budgets. So week one, it's gonna be a lot like our Christmas Savings Challenge, but in week one, we're gonna save $1. That's gonna give you a balance of $1. You check off the box
when that's complete. On week two, you're going to save $2, giving you a balance of $3. You check that off, you're done, and you go all the way down. Now with this savings challenge, the money you are saving is the same as the corresponding week
that you're completing. Do you see on week 10, you're saving $10? Week 20, you're saving $20, and so on all the way down. At the end of a year, okay, after 52 weeks, you're
gonna have $1,378 saved. Now for some people, they're like, man for a full year,
that's not very much money, but you know what? To a lot of people, that's a lot of money. And I know in the beginning of my journey, that was a small trip with my son. Even if it was just a small
weekend trip to go fishing and maybe do one night of camping. This was also a great emergency fund. So the 1,378, it's making something out of really small amounts. So this is the 52-Week
Money Saving Challenge. So those are my four savings challenges that you can start today if you are working with
a small or tight budget, if you found this video
helpful, please like it, and don't forget to subscribe. (upbeat keyboard music) Dang. Hold on, okay. I'm gonna get...okay. Okay, let's do the beginning, okay. (upbeat keyboard music)
