Since Christmas 2006 our family has participated in a self-imposed annual “Shopping Embargo.” This basically meant that we stopped buying unnecessary stuff and paid greater attention to the things we did buy. There was a list of rules, but basically, from December 26 until February 28 we restricted our purchases to the basic necessities: groceries, fuel, medicine, soap, things like that.
Overall, it was great, and I’d recommend a personal shopping embargo for anyone. Shopping mindfully became second nature to us. We saved money, thought a lot about how we spent money and why we bought things, and learned a lot about ourselves in the process. You can read my past posts about it here if you’re interested.
So here’s the update… I’ve decided not to host a Shopping Embargo here this year. It’s not because we don’t need to save money – we do – but I don’t have anything new to say about it after so many years. I have said all there possibly is to say about the issue and I’m drained. :)
I AM tossing around some other Embargo-related ideas but I won’t have the details ironed out until some time in early January.
In the meantime, I wanted to share the details of a different kind of money-saving challenge that we’re doing: the 52-week money savin’ challenge! Laurel Anderson (who blogs here and is on Twitter here) shared this concept and I thought it was great.
The idea is a simple one:
- You take a jar.
- You put money in the jar every week for a whole year (that’s 52 weeks).
There’s one other thing. At the beginning of Week One you put one dollar in the jar. At Week Two you put in two dollars, Week Three is three dollars, and so on, putting slightly more and more money in the jar each week. If you’re able to keep it up, by week 52 you will have $1378.00 socked away; a decent sum of money saved!
SO. We talked about it as a family and have decided to make this a family money-saving project. Once we accrue a bit of cash we’ll move it to a bank account. Until then, this is our jar:
I’m pretty excited about it. I think it’s a good lesson in saving. There are handy sheets you can print out to go with your jar too, so you can get the satisfaction of checking something off every week. Click here for some examples you can print.
Thinking ahead to how it’s going to go down, I realize it may hurt a little to put away $50 a week in December, but in my head I’ve already cut back on our Christmas expenditures next year and adopted the four gift rule. (Have you heard about it? You give one thing they want, one thing they need, one thing to wear, and one thing to read.)
If we’re successful at raising the cash, we’ll spend it on a winter getaway at Chateau Montebello. Fine dining, dogsledding, skating, swimming, skiing… the plan is to spend a couple nights there in December 2014. I think that a holiday is better than gifts anyway. What do you think? Would you consider joining the 52-week challenge?
