15 Ways to Make Saving More Enjoyable

Don’t you wish you could make saving fun?

Saving for retirement, or for any other reason, can be tough.

So I hope you will enjoy these money saving tips, and the infographic at the end of the article. Remember to download and print it out as a reminder.

Retiring early. Buying a house. Covering the ballooning costs of college. It’s all made possible by a healthy budget and a great deal of saving. But the truth is that saving money, to put it politely, is not all that fun. To put it more bluntly, it’s kind of boring. Most people would rather buy a new TV than sock away $500 for a later date. Saving money also can be pretty difficult.

That’s why you hear shocking statistics from time to time that 60% of millennials in America don’t have enough money to cover a $1,000 emergency or that 53% of twenty-somethings in the UK have no savings.

And financial stress is a very real thing. Worrying about money can really bring you down. One study shows that 85% of adults feel stressed about money from time to time, while 30% feel stressed about money regularly.

That’s why it’s important to find ways to motivate yourself to save money and to have a little bit of fun while doing so.

Luckily, bloggers, authors, and app developers have given us a ton of simple, non time-consuming ways to make saving money less of a chore and I hope you will enjoy these money saving tips.

Practice Minimalism

A growing number of people have turned to the trend of minimalism (a way of life that focuses on cutting out everything that is not essential) and experimented with savings challenges that certainly aren’t easy but that allow us to trick our brains into saving money and having fun with it.

A good example is the No Spend Challenge, which challenges you to cut out spending on coffee runs, eating out, ride sharing, and everything else that is not strictly needed. (Many people practice No Spend November in an effort to accrue extra spending money before the holidays.)

Meanwhile, the innovative 52 Week Savings Challenge allows you to save a good bit of cash — $1,378 — in a year by saving $1 the first week, $2 the second week, and so on for the rest of the year. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it all adds up.

“Gamify” Your Budget

Then, there are a whole host of apps that allow you to save money slowly but surely. Innovative apps like Blast open up insured savings accounts for you and deposit small sums of money every time you play Words With Friends. You’d have to challenge your friends to many games before you had a large sum saved up, but, as they say, every little bit helps.

Or, you could try an app like Qapital that allows you to “fine” yourself (and be the savings police) when you spend money that you aren’t supposed to. It’s little things like this that help us have some fun with our finances.

In that same vein, some find it fun to join online commitment platforms like stickK, a goal-setting platform in which you set a goal (maybe to save $400), settle on a timeline, and then put something at stake (your money or your reputation) to keep you accountable.

Go Analog

In the age of technology, there are also a surprising number of ways to have fun saving using just a pen and paper. You’ve probably heard of bullet journaling, an immensely popular form of organization that merges design and goal-setting.

Many people also turn to the century-old Japanese budgeting system called Kakeibo, which means “household finance ledger.” The accounting system, originally created by Japanese journalist Hani Motoko in 1904 for housewives, is intended to put you in control of your budget and make you aware of your spending habits by answering four basic questions: