My New Savings Plan (totally my banks fault)

My bank did something extremely annoying.

They started sending me monthly repost of my spending habits.

I do not appreciate them.

Before these reports, I know that somehow I was never adding to my savings. I would set some aside, then pull it out again not long after. Always telling myself that I’ll add more from my next paycheck.

Would it be a spoiler to tell you that that savings plan hasn’t worked? Yeah, it was a surprise to me too.

Then I found those damn back reports. I can appreciate that they were trying to be helpful, but I did not want to see so explicitly how I was hemorrhaging money.

One of my main issues is that I’m an emotional shopper. Either I’m buying something because I feel sad, celebrating because I’m happy, or just because I was bored at work. And given enough time, I can justify any purchase. Spend over $400 on 5 balls of hand-dyed yarn to knit a shrug? Of course it’s worth it, I will wear it everyday during winter!!

(I’ve worn it exactly twice)

(But we don’t need to talk about that anymore)

Clearly, things need to change.

Apart from being an emotional shopper, something else I know about myself is that I work best with visual goals and rewards. There are many a savings plan out there, but I’ve made my own where there are built in rewards. The circled squares? Those you can spend! And you can color in the squares as you save!! Isn’t this fun!!!

Actually, it’s probably going to suck, and I’m definitely going to need to come up with a better coping mechanism than shopping. But it’s necessary for so many of my life plans to have some savings, just like I’m sure it is for you, so this is going to be a priority for 2023.

A whole grand, one $20 at a time. We’ve got this x