Are you looking to make 2022 your best financial year yet? Financial challenges are here to help! Committing to good financial health can help you stay up to date on bills, improve your credit, build a savings account, and so much more. In other words, paying attention to your financial well-being can keep you from stressing about money.
One way to accomplish this is by completing financial challenges. Like a fitness challenge, these allow you to push yourself to create better financial habits and make tangible progress. And there’s an abundance of fun options that can work for you and your goals for 2022.
Financial Challenges for 2022
1. Save $10 a Week
If you’re looking for a way to boost your savings account and create a better habit of saving money, this can be a great challenge. It’s also highly adaptable. You just decide how much money you’d like to save, and how often. A common choice is to save $10 a week, which amounts to $520 a year. But some people may want to adjust based on their income level and their savings target. If you want to be slightly more ambitious, you could save $5 a day for a total of $1,825 a year.
2. Pay Down Debts with a Paper Chain
If you have high credit card balances, your goal for the year may be to pay down your debts. If you’re a visual person, making a paper chain can help you get excited about hitting milestones. This challenge works by first identifying how much debt you have or want to pay down. You don’t need a time frame. Then, you create a paper chain, where each link in the chain represents a portion of that debt. For example, one link could equal $50 or $100 or another value altogether–whatever makes sense for you. Then, every time you pay down your debt by that much, you remove a link on your chain. The idea is to place the paper chain somewhere you see it every day. As the chain shrinks, you get to see your progress in a fun and encouraging way.
3. The Round-Up Method
If you tend to make frequent purchases, you can challenge yourself to round up your spending and save the difference. For example, if you buy a $4.25 coffee, you’ll take the remaining 75 cents and sock it away in your savings account. You don’t just have to round up to the dollar either. If you really want to challenge yourself, you can round up to other intervals. Say the nearest multiple of 5, or the nearest 10, or even the nearest 100 for large purchases. By doing this, you’re either accumulating some serious savings or putting a little more thought into your purchases before you make them.
4. Snowball Savings
This challenge is a variation of the first method. Rather than choosing a static savings goal, you’re actually going to increase your savings each day or week. This is something you can do for 30 days and still have a major impact. For example, you can choose to save money every day for 30 days, increasing by a dollar each time. On Day 1, you save a single dollar, on Day 10, you’re putting $10 into your savings. By the end of 30 days, you will have $465. That may be a steep goal, so you can adjust as you need to to make it challenging while still being realistic.
5. The Money Envelope
If you’re wanting something with less predictability, consider the Money Envelope. The idea is that you have 100 empty envelopes, and you label each one from 1 to 100. Then you shuffle the envelopes and put them in a container. Each day of the challenge, you choose an envelope at random and fill it with the corresponding amount of cash. So the #8 envelope should get $8, and #95 should get $95, etc. By the end of 100 days, you will have saved $5,050. The best part is, you can break this up however you wish. For example, you could do this challenge for 100 days straight, or you could do the challenge every other day. You can make it work for however you need, and in less than a year you can still have over $5,000 saved up.
No matter what money habits you’re trying to create in 2022, there’s a financial challenge that can help you get there and create good money habits. Give one of these a try, and see how it works for you. If you are still short of funds and in need of an emergency loan, apply today with Jora Credit.