01 Feb 2024

Use Our Budget Buddy Tool To Help You Save

With a new year comes new goals, and new potential. If you are someone who loves to plan, this time of year can be a great opportunity to hit that reset button, reflect on the last 12 months, plan for the next 12, and re-align with your priorities.

The last year saw some incredible changes in the savings space and savings providers had to really understand what our members and customers needs and objectives were, to be able to offer products that suited everyone.

Whether you are saving for a deposit for a house, your dream wedding, a new car, the holiday of a lifetime, saving for the children, the grand-children or even just your own rainy-day fund, you first need to understand your budget!

Our re-vamped budget buddy is a great tool, in an editable format to help you see your monthly finances easily. Firstly, you review how much money is coming in, whether that’s through your salary, savings, pension, rental yields etc. Then review your essential expenditure and any personal expenditure that you have planned for each month. Once you have completed the document, total everything up at the end, and see what you have left.

There are a few ways of saving that could work best for you, and it's all about understanding your budget first, making sure the essentials are taken care of before putting money into a savings account that may limit access to your funds for a period of time.

A penny a day challenge

The logic behind this is that you save 1p on day 1, then add a penny to your amount each day. This can take a few different approaches, some like to do it in reverse, so you aren’t putting the larger amounts away in the lead up to Christmas, some like to have all the amounts and choose at random how much to put away.

You can download a printable PDF here and tick the days off as you go in whichever order you choose!

If you’d prefer to do monthly totals, these work out as:

January	February	March
£4.96	£12.74	£23.25
April	May	June
£31.65	£42.16	£49.95
July	August	September
£61.07	£70.68	£77.55
October	November	December
£89.59	£95.85	£112.16

Or in reverse:

January	February	March
£112.16	£95.85	£89.59
April	May	June
£77.55	£70.68	£61.07
July	August	September
£49.95	£42.16	£31.65
October	November	December
£23.25	£12.74	£4.96

You will need the right type of savings account to be able to deposit whenever you like, so this type of regular savings is generally suited to an instant savings account, that has no restrictions on when you can deposit.

Whether you want to use the 1p savings challenge or not, I recommend taking a look at our new budget buddy and set some personal savings goals for 2024 and make your savings work harder for you.

Monmouthshire Building Society is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority. Financial Services Register Number: 206052. FCA register address www.fca.org.uk/register/. We are members of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. We are members of the Building Societies Association and Council of Mortgage Lenders. Details of our Customer Satisfaction and Complaints procedures are available and complaints that we cannot resolve may be referred to the Financial Ombudsman Service (http://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/). By accessing any part of this website, you shall be deemed to have accepted our Website Terms of Use.

Use Our Budget Buddy Tool To Help You Save

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