The Budget Challenge

Time for a new challenge.

I have been wanting to do something budget related for a while. I wanted to combine saving some much needed money away with experiencing a more restricted way of living. My initial idea was 'spend thirty pounds in thirty days' but I've thought about it a lot, and with the physical demands of my course I didn't want to risk not having enough nutritious food! It seemed like that was be a challenge I was bound to fail, so I took to google to see if there were any other budget related challenges out there.

I came across this.

It's a year long challenge, in which you increase your savings each week by a dollar, obviously a pound in my case, and by the end of it you have saved a tidy £1378 stashed away.

The first thing I thought when I saw it was 'why would you do it that way round?' The challenge gets more demanding and difficult as it goes along! It seems to me it would be more sensible to do it backwards - saving £52 the first week, £51 the second and so on. That way, you save a lot straight away, and week by week you not only have a lot saved away, but your budget is getting higher too, and the challenge is getting easier.

So I flipped it :)

And I decided to make it this months challenge to do the first four weeks of this system. (Which actually makes it a twenty eight day challenge, but I shall forgive myself) I will be saving £52 in week one, £51 in week two, £50 in week three and £49 in week four.

My usual maximum weekly budget is a very comfortable £70, so that leaves me with £18 for week one, £19 for week two, £20 for week three and £21 for week four.

Overall - I will aim to be spending £78 in one month instead of £280

So I've cut my spending to about not much over a quarter of my usual budget - which I think is pretty challenging! So I am satisfied with that.

Financially, I usually start my week on a friday (because most of my spending is on a weekend so I like to do that with a full budget) So I actually started this challenge two days ago. I have managed to only spend £10 on my food shop, but am already lamenting spending £1.50 on some takeaway chips (how expensive that feels to me now!) That leaves me with only £6.50 for the rest of the week! Let's hope I can make it stretch.

Twenty five days to go.