Closing Ceremonies for “Save $100 This Week” Challenge
Many people clicked “like” on the simplistic yet powerful challenge called Save $100 this Week.
Did YOU do the challenge? I did, and now I’ve got more than $100 extra compared to what I would otherwise have.
You DO know you have to actually do this stuff if you want to become wealthy, don’t you? As much as I love you reading every day, you won’t get much richer with only that level of commitment.
To finish up reporting the MMM family results, we had $91 saved in the first five days, then:
Tuesday: Bike Miles: 6, Car Miles: 0, Spending: $0. Challenge savings: $10 for skipped car trips.
Wednesday: Bike Miles 4, Car Miles: 40 (ouch! wife drove to another town for a lady party, I drove my construction van around town to do a bit of actual paid work). Spending: $38 on groceries.
Week Total: Bike Miles: 45, Car Miles: 40, Spending: $187,
Challenge Savings: $101
Not Bad! If I were to keep this challenge going permanently, I’d end up about $76,800 richer after ten years. I probably will keep some of the changes I learned this week , because as with every challenge, you actually learn unexpected things as you go through it.
Now what do we do with the $100 we saved? If you have any debt, make a point of paying an extra $100 towards your highest interest balance, and do it quickly, before you get around to spending the hundred on something else!
For me, being recently mortgage-free, I can ‘stash it back into the handy Vanguard 500 Index Fund (VFINX) where it will grow and pay dividends for the rest of my life. By the time I die at age 104, these 100 little employees will have contributed about $10,000 of income to me, even after adjusting for inflation, in the form of growth and dividends.
Sweet? Yeah, sweeter than just burning through another $100 tank of gas!
The NEXT challenge, coming tomorrow morning, will take it up a level. Actually about eighty nine levels, if you consider the levels to be measured in linear steps, because the prize for this challenge is nine thousand dollars!
Tune in tomorrow baby.
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Mr. Money Mustache is a family man living in the United States who retired from work, relatively wealthy, at about age 30. After several years of retirement, he noticed that his still-working peers were envious of his lifestyle. They were making more money than he ever had, yet they were somehow still broke. So he decided to write this blog to educate the world on how it is done.
Yo MMM!
I had a pretty good week, lots of $0 days, no beers at lunch, most meals cooked at home. Cycling to work. $2 fish tacos. I must have saved over $300, as I could have eaten several $30 meals a day, but didn’t. The math for calculating savings is a little subjective…
A few competitive friends have initiated another challenge, and I have decided to participate:
Who can live on $200 a week?
The rules are simple, to keep it easy for the participants: each Sunday make sure we have exactly $200 in our wallets.* Pay cash for everything. See how much you have left at the end of the week. Groceries, transportation, restaurants, movies, concerts, booze, drugs, videogames, clothes, hardware, dates, whatever. Bills are out of the equation.
It’s an elimination challenge, best cheapskate wins.
They did make room for an occasional “luxury exemption” for things like vacations, which I hope does not get abused.
For the hardcore frugalists, $200 should be a breeze. For my decadent urban friends, this will be a true test of wills. I’ll keep you posted.
Herbert
*I realize that paying cash is inefficient compared to using a dividend card, but the spirit of the challenge demands keeping the accounting simple. These are an honest bunch, and cheating is unlikely.
Congratulations H. S.!
You are right that savings are a bit subjective, but still pretty easy to figure out if you actually CATCH yourself craving a big splurge and then hold back because it’s challenge week. This Catching motion is what Mr. Money Mustache wants to burn into people’s subconscious minds. Because until you’re retired, it should ALWAYS be a Challenge Week to a certain extent.
Also, your own $200 challenge sounds like a GREAT one for city folks like yourself. As an upcoming article will explore, much of our modern spending is caused by peer and family pressure ($20,000 weddings, happy hour at a bar instead of someone’s house, etc.). If your friends are actually in on the game, it’s a Mustachian Party for all!. $200 would feel like crazy spending for me, since I eat $50 of groceries and that’s about it, unless it happens to be one of the years when I buy a new pair of pants. But you gotta start somewhere :-)
We’re budgeting $600 a month for 2 people for everything that is not rent or savings. With that we can shop for organic groceries and go out for dinner once a month and buy some drinks too.
Sure, you can spend less on food, but it’s a matter of priorities.
The challenge for us is everyday when we get home tired after work, to actually cook a quick meal instead of ordering takeout. But then, takeout is not an option because I hate everything about it (crappy taste, greasy, salty, full of empty calories). So i cook. and the stach grows.
… and yes, that includes utilities too..
Very impressive! I still have a few frugality tricks to learn myself, it seems. Are these US figures or another country?
We live in the US, in a very, very expensive area at the East coast.
It took me a while to figure out the system (where can I get the best groceries for my money), and we don’t eat a lot of meat which saves $$ big time.
Frugality is vital for living here, as I am neither willing to compromise our savings rate nor sleep in the car.
Luckily we’re moving soon, so I expect to be able to save a lot more then.
Question: how do you reconcile your earth-loving tendencies (which I share) with investment in the Vanguard Fund, which includes hard-core polluters such as Chevron and Exxon, hard-core animal testers like Johnson & Johnson and Proctor & Gamble, and general corporate ne’er-do-wells like Walmart (think “dead peasants” insurance, for a start) and McDonald’s (where to begin?). I’m not saying we have to be perfect, just that I’m struggling with that one.
@Laura – my article on Socially-Responsible Investing might be right up your ally: http://blog.brandoncurtis.net/2013/04/ethical-investing.html
(not tryin’a steal your pageviews Triple-M, but this was something I have thought about too and so I wrote a bit about it!)