CAN UGX 1,500 MAKE A DIFFERENCE TO YOUR PERSONAL FINANCES? NUGGETS ON APPLYING THE 52 WEEK MONEY CHALLENGE TO YOUR ADVANTAGE.

It is a few days to 2020 and many of us are now running with New Year resolutions. If you have not yet put yours down, I am sure you are thinking about them. You better put them writing if you intend to stick to them. Well, I am not here to talk about everything New Year Resolutions. My special focus is on how you can form better personal finance habits in the New Year and better yet, fast track your journey to financial freedom. That’s what fascinates me, and it is my mission to reach out to whoever cares with the simple yet effective techniques that I am applying to grow myself financially.

Before I get lost from giving you the real message as per the title of the article, I would like to ask you a simple question which I posted to a few WhatsApp groups last week for discussion. HOW MUCH DIFFERENCE DO YOU THINK UGX 1,500 CAN MAKE TO YOUR PERSONAL FINANCES IN A PERIOD OF ONE YEAR? When I posted this question, I allowed the people to make as many assumptions as they would. Some of them looked at it as little or nothing while others took a positive stance and said it would make a difference when stack with other 1500s to make a bigger sum. What would your response be? You know your answer better.

I would like to state that 1500 can make a huge difference depending how you look at it and how you apply it to yourself. I will take some time to explain how. To do this, I will make reference to the popular and widespread 52 Week Money Challenge. Have you had about it? If not, you will move away with some nuggets. Long story short, UGX 1500 can make a huge difference if applied to a 52 Money Week Challenge which I explain subsequently.

WHAT IS THE 52 MONEY WEEK CHALLENGE?

We all know how important it is to save money and I don’t think I would have to emphasize it in any way. In fact, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who says they don’t like saving money. But how many of us do it with the discipline it deserves? Because of the everyday pressures around us, it can feel impossible to end each month with a savings balance that’s higher than it was the month before. That is why personal finance experts have come up with different ways of how to motivate people to save more. One of such inventions is the 52 Week Money Challenge. The challenge in its original version emphasizes saving a particular amount of money and then increasing it over the next 52 weeks. That’s a full year. Say, you would start by saving 1 Dollar in week one and increase it by a Dollar every other week. This means you will save 2 Dollars in week two, 3 Dollars in weeks three and so on until you will be able to save 52 Dollars in week 52.

The Dollar currency is just for illustration and this can be customized to any currency. So, I decided to customize this to Uganda Shillings by starting with a paltry amount of UGX 1,500 in week one. This means that you would increase the amounts by 1500 every other week until week 52. You will save UGX 3000 in week 2, UGX 4,500 in week three and so on until you will save 78,000UGX in week 52. Do you know how much that would be at the end of the year? Well, you will be destined to have UGX 2,067,000 more on your savings / retirement account by the end of the year. In the last month of the year, would be able to put aside UGX 303,000 Is that money to be excited about? It will depend on your circumstances, how much you are making and how much of it you are able to save currently but what I am sure about is that there are so many Ugandans who will struggle to show off that amount from their savings accounts by the end of the year. Not even the so-called middle class who wake up every morning to go to “cool offices”.

However, I wouldn’t wish you to get lost in the amounts. You could choose to customize the amounts to what your potential is. It could be 5,000, 10,000 or 20,000. My only advice would be that you should stretch yourself as much as you can, but you should NOT be over ambitious and set yourself up for failure which might make you hate the challenge itself. Know that the small amounts apply at the beginning, but the amounts will grow over the weeks. For instance, if you choose to challenge yourself with UGX 10,000, you will need to understand that you will have to part with 520,000 in that last week which equals to UGX 2,020,000 in just one month at the end of the year. If you choose to challenge yourself with 20,000, you will part with UGX 1,040,000 in week 52 or 4,040,000 in that last month. Challenging yourself with 20,000 would mean that you end the year with UGX 27,560,000 more in your savings account BUT how realistic is that to a typical Ugandan?

In my financial literacy sessions, I always encourage my students to start with baby steps if they would like to develop a savings culture and see themselves saving more. A discipline is something that you build over time. If you start small and manage, it gives you the stamina to handle huge amounts when you choose to go big. That’s that rationale of me basing on a paltry UGX 1,500 at the because I know the readers of my articles are diverse and include students as well as low income earners who are just starting out on their journey to personal finance mastery and financial independence. Some of them are debt ridden with bank loans.

GETTING STARTED WITH THE CHALLENGE

Ready to challenge yourself but not sure on where to start? No worries, I am sharing with you some guidance. In fact, I have already put together a customizable template that I am willing to share with everyone who is interested in participating in this challenge for the next year. Get in touch with me [ +256781819477] if you are interested.

Below are some ideas on how to take on the challenge and make it workable for you.

1)        PRINT THE TEMPLATE AND MARK EVERY WEEK AS YOU SAVE: Once you have the template, I will encourage you to make a printout or have it somewhere easily accessible on your computer so that you can mark of the weeks as you save. This way, you will have a visible dashboard that can keep you motivated and help you know how you are doing over the weeks.

2)        AUTOMATE YOUR SAVINGS: One of the hardest parts about saving money is making the conscious decision not to spend those shillings on fun, momentary things, and instead to stick them in a jar or a savings account. That is why I encourage automation of your savings. Automation has never been easier. These days banks have integrated with Mobile Money and you could save while chilling in your room. By the way, do you know that MTN Mokash as an option of Automated Savings? That could be an option for you. I started it earlier this month and it is working for me

3)        YOU COULD CHOOSE TO APPLY THE CHALLENGE TO MONTHLY: If your goal is simply to establish some fiscal discipline and save some reasonable amount, there’s no reason you have to do it weekly, nor with the bulk of the burden hitting you in the last month of the challenge which is usually December when your expenditures are likely to grow up because of the festivities. You can opt to do it monthly. The beauty with the weekly challenges though is that it lets you grow the discipline gradually starting with amounts that may not even be noticeable to you but will make all the huge difference to your personal finances.

4)        DO A 104-WEEK CHALLENGE: Should you limit yourself to 52 weeks? Not at all. After all, the whole point of the challenge is to develop a stable savings habit. If you were to keep intensifying up your savings by just a UGX 1500 a week into the next year, you’d save up another UGX 4,000,000 by the end of the second year – or about UGX 6,123,000 total over two years. Why not stretch the challenge further of you have the stamina?

5)        SET AMOUNTS THAT APPLY TO YOU AND YOUR INCOME STATUS / SAVINGS GOALS. Alternatively, I know that advanced savers or high earners who already have huge amounts in savings and investment may brush off my idea of saving a few shillings a week at the start of the challenge. If you are already good at the game and an accomplished saver or have an ambitious savings target, you could do start a higher amount and grow it by a certain amount per week. You could choose to start with UGX 100,000 in week one and increase it by 10,000 every other week. Be creative with how you want to apply the challenge.

6)        GET AN ACCOUNTABILITY PARTNER: Worried that you may slide back to your old ways and not achieve that aims of the challenge? I would encourage you to find someone else interested in taking up the challenge and be accountable to each other. If you can’t find an accountability partner but are interested in having one, get in touch with me (WhatsApp on +256781819477) and I could be of help to hold you accountable. The accountability partner will be helpful in making sure you save the money that you are supposed to save every week or month. You could choose to be competitive with the partner that you have chosen and see who saves more by the end of the challenge.

7)        COMBINE THE SAVINGS CHALLENGE WITH OTHER RESOLUTIONS FOR THE YEAR: Many people make resolutions at the beginning of the year and struggle with sticking to them. How about challenging yourself to saving more every time you act on your resolutions and achieve something. You could say, for every day of exercising completed, I will save an extra 1500 on my money challenge that week. Trust me, it will make a difference.

FINAL THOUGHTS.

While the 52 Week Money Challenge may not work for everyone, we can all agree on one thing, which is that saving money is good. Getting started is half the battle. And sticking to a savings plan will set you on the path to financial success. For some people, especially the many young Ugandans and other low-income earners who have little or no savings whatsoever, the 52-Week Money Challenge offers the forthright game plan and inspiration needed to help them start saving. It is certainly not the only way to do it, but it might be a game changer for who.

The challenge might have its own weaknesses (not discussed in the article) but it will definitely help you start a routine of stacking away some money for your own future. It is up to you to stick to it.

Finally, I would encourage you not to have this money where you are going to access it easily, if you can’t automate it, you can choose to always take it to the bank after say a month in the initial days but even the weekly amount could be outright banked in the later weeks because the amount will be bigger.

I wish you a happy Savings Discipline in the coming year and decade.

PS: If you are interested in participating in the challenge and would like to have the customizable template, please write me an e-mail on [email protected]

Written by Darious Nkwasibwe

Financial Literacy Enthusiast and Trainer

+256781819477 / +256772122994

[email protected]

PPS: Feel free to get in touch with me on the above contacts and we can discuss more. You can also send me an e-mail on matters of personal finance, and I will be happy to respond.