I just wanted to give y’all an update since first asking you last month to take the Savings Pledge with me. If you recall, I invited you to check out the Savings Pledge app on Facebook and consider committing to saving a certain amount of money each week as part of an overall drive by Savings.com to save America 5 billion dollars. This is about setting a personal goal—both in how much you want to save and whether that’s truly money in the bank or earmarked for a specific purchase—but I tried to sweeten the deal a little by offering to use your commitments to influence how much money I would donate to my locate food bank at the end of the year, above and beyond the money I’ve already committed to save.
At the end of July, I counted 68 Want Not readers who let me know they had pledged. I had committed to set aside one cent for every confirmed pledge per online purchase through the end of the year (so, I placed an order with Amazon on July 30th and put $.68 cents aside when I did it). As of today, I’ve only set aside $3.86 in that fund (that’s donations per online purchase, and it changed as the number of pledges changed). I’ve decided to round it up to a full $1 per online purchase I make from now through the end of the year. This is because I am bad at math I’m generous. Or something. Ahem.
How are you doing on your savings pledge? Have you committed? Will you?
I took the pledge and for me the main thing to save right now is no fast food for lunch for the family. So on Sunday on our drive home from my parents we packed a picnic lunch and ate in the car. This week I have no plans to take kids out to lunch. With kids meal costing $3-$5/each + my meal – savings add up quickly! There will still be the occasional just get stuck and eat out or pre-planned out – but my goal is to make them very far and few between and truly a special treat.
Yay for you Mir! I have been resisting my urges to go to starbucks more often and that makes it easier to accept the automatic transfer I have going to my savings account. 🙂
I did GREAT at the grocery store last week! I committed to saving $35/week. Well, by combining coupons with Kroger store sales, I saved $90 on my grocery bill!!! That’s huge for us! Thanks for the inspiration! Yay!
Hi Mir, yes I signed teh pledge yesterday and forgot to comment here and tell you. . . I already do (what I feel is ) a lot to save money (coupons, cloth diapers, rarely eating out. . .) so I pledged another $10 per week because I think I can cut out most junk/ snack food from our house. If it’s not there, we won’t eat it, plus saving a few dollars. Thanks!!!
Well, I didn’t have much of an update for you when this posted, but now I do. So I’m putting it up here waaaay late.
I was back in school for a second degree, so my husband and I were getting used to living on one paycheck. Believe me, it took a LOT of getting used to, but we did it and haven’t dipped into our savings yet. (Although we will be pulling a little bit out the end of this month, since we have a little over a month of absolutely no paychecks after three months of 1/3-amount paychecks due to his weird teaching schedule. Then we’ll be back to what has become the new “normal” around here.) Well, due to some issues with the university I was attending (oh my goodness, do all large universities have such crappy student support for answering questions and helping students figure things out, or is it just this one?), I realized that it wasn’t working out. I loved my classes and was doing awesome in them, but they kept adding classes I had to take on, so my two-year second bachelor’s become a four-year (or more) second bachelor’s degree. (Yeah…)
When I was trying to figure out what to do, my old job called me up and asked if I would like to come back. That led to a lot of thinking and over-thinking and discussions with people I trust. One of my friends suggested something that we’re going to put into practice: Since we are so used to living on one paycheck, we’ll continue with our super miserly, amazingly frugal ways for at least another year. During that year, I will put my entire new paycheck into savings and build up a much bigger buffer, which will then be used once we figure out our next step (moving to a more conducive area for jobs and education for me? have my husband get the second master’s he wants? move to Spain for no good reason, other than we suddenly would have the money to do that?)
So my new pledge is this: my entire paycheck (with the exception of a few necessities, such as the tires we need before our winter begins in, oh, probably another month or two) is my savings pledge. Can we swing it? I don’t know, Mir, but it’s worth a shot, isn’t it?
I’m a little apprehensive about this, but I think it’s doable. We’ve been doing it for close to a year already, with the exception that I didn’t have a paycheck to put into savings. *big, deep breath*