52 Week Savings Challenge

Many people view the start of the new year as a time to reset, create new goals, and focus on achieving those goals. While some people choose to focus on their physical or mental health (which are excellent things), we are a big proponent of focusing on your financial health.

Making a concerted effort to focus on your financial health might sound a bit overwhelming, but you can start small, and over time build up to something on a larger scale. An easy way to start small, is to make a goal to consciously deposit money into your savings account. Having a plan in place makes this action a lot easier than it may seem. Adding in a challenge, makes it more exciting! That’s where the 52-week savings challenge comes in.

If you’ve never heard of the 52-week savings challenge, it’s a fairly straightforward approach. You can choose to start the challenge at any point in time. On week one, you deposit one dollar into your savings, on week two, you deposit two dollars into your savings, you’d continue this for 52 weeks, depositing $52 on week 52. At the end of the 52 weeks, you will have $1,378!

Of course, there are other variations you could try as well to achieve the same end result. Perhaps, you find the end of the year a harder time to save money. You could reverse the order in which you save and deposit $52 on week one and $1 on week 52. You could also save an equal amount each week ($26.50). If you prefer this approach, you could set up an automatic transfer from your checking account to your savings, that way you don’t even have to think about depositing your money.

Perhaps the 52-week savings challenge isn’t your style, but you’d still like to do something to better your financial health. Check out our Financial Wellness Center. There are multiple articles and coaches related to understanding and building your financial health. The Financial Wellness Assessment will allow you to reflect on your current habits and at the end provides you with articles that may be relevant to your specific needs.

You can also login to your Digital Banking account to access the “My Financial Toolkit” where you can track all your spending and create a budget.

Whatever your goals for the year may be, we hope you find success.