<\/span><\/h2>\nBefore I go on, I should make a confession: This didn’t actually start as a savings strategy.<\/p>\n
I started saving my change because I was annoyed at carrying it around all the time. I dumped pennies, nickels, dimes, and all the rest into a jar just so my money wouldn’t be so annoyingly heavy. But when the coins in the jar started to rise, all of the game mechanics I described above kicked in.<\/p>\n
\u201cHey, I wonder how much money I could save by tossing all<\/i> of my change in here,” I thought. “I don’t think I’d miss it, so why not give it a chance?\u201d<\/p>\n
So I did. Instead of just the smaller change, I put all of my coins in the jar. And I was truly surprised at the feeling of accomplishment and success I gained when I could put a $1 or $2 coin in the jar. It felt like a real \u201cgood progress\u201d kind of day!<\/p>\n
That’s when I started to change my behavior.<\/p>\n
The first thing I noticed was that I was making fewer transactions via debit or credit, and trying to do as much as I could in cash \u2014 all so that I’d have more change left over to toss into the jar. I’d actually feel a loss when I made a credit transaction. If the transaction was for, say, $12.97, then I’d feel like \u201cthere goes $2.03 that could have gone into the jar!\u201d<\/p>\n
I found myself going even further. For instance, I’d adjust my purchase total so that I could get more change. My standing Starbucks order, which cost $4.54, was downgraded a size so that I would have more change for the jar.<\/p>\n
At the same time, I’d sometimes find myself adding something small to a purchase so that instead of a total cost of $19.47 ($0.53 change), for example, I’d spend $20.97 ($4.03 change).<\/p>\n
It got to the point that whenever I passed by a Laundromat, I’d hop in, slide a $5 bill into the change machine, and have it spit out more coins. Yes, I know it sounds kind of crazy, but it was fun. The result was more and more change into the jar, and more and more satisfaction for me!<\/p>\n
<\/span>Hacking Your Savings and Growth<\/span><\/h2>\nOkay, what’s this story really all about?<\/p>\n
The key takeaway here isn’t that you could adopt my<\/i> coin jar savings strategy to save $723 in the next seven months without noticing. (Maybe you could, maybe you couldn’t.)<\/p>\n
My message is that whatever your goal, you should find a way to turn it into a game, because whereas we do chores because we have to, we play games because we want<\/i> to. When we want to do something, we often find ourselves doing more and more of it.<\/p>\n
This applies to savings and personal finance, but it applies to a lot of other things, too: waking up early, exercising, controlling your diet, and how much television you watch. Heck, if you’re a business owner, it even applies to getting your customers to want to move through your chain of conversion. (Can you tell I’m a marketer?)<\/p>\n
Here are the key things to remember when turning your chores into games:<\/p>\n
\n- There should be frequent opportunities for action, and immediate feedback.<\/li>\n
- You should have some way of \u201cracking up points\u201d over time.<\/li>\n
- You should be able to adjust your behavior and rack up more of those points.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
What do you<\/i> think? Is there an important gamification element that I missed? How do you trick yourself into saving more? And I’m curious: How much have you managed to save with your<\/i> coin jar?<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
![\"coin](\"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/rsz_gettyimages-469932863_1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
<\/b><\/i>In January, I started a savings experiment. The experiment was designed to save money for my \u201cemergency cushion\u201d account without feeling the loss from my pocket or budget. I figured I could probably save about $30 to $50 per month \u2014 not much, but not peanuts either. In six months, I hoped to save about $250, which would be a smart way to save money.<\/p>\n
Last week, a month later than I’d originally intended, I deposited the money into my savings account. Before I did, I counted it up to see how much I’d accumulated. I had $723. Wow!<\/i> And I’d managed to save all of that without even noticing.<\/p>\n
<\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3229,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[476],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98222"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3229"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}