365 Days Penny Challenge – How to Save Up to £700 in 52 Weeks

A penny a day for a year!

How much would that be?

Why and for what reason should I join the penny challenge?

Have you found yourself casting about for answers to these questions? A decision to start saving money is your hero’s armor. You aren’t wrong this time if you’re up with the challenge. Saving is one habit that transforms people from beggars to generous givers; from employees to bountiful employers; from poor to very rich people. This habit has created billionaires out of those that once struggled with a few pennies.

Should I believe it’s your turn to share another mouthwatering transformation testimony? Well, that depends on the choice you make after reading this article. This article has only one purpose – to help you jumpstart a savings lifestyle. You can start this by saving a penny a day for a year.

What’s Penny Challenge By The Way?

It’s a straightforward strategy designed to simplify daily savings. In other words, it’s a routine you should embrace to make saving money your habit.

• You start this challenge by saving a penny on the first day.
• On the second day, you save two pennies. That would be an additional one penny to the amount you saved on the first day.
• Save three pennies on the third day – one penny more than you saved the second day and two pennies more than you saved the first day. It continues in this progression for the next 365 days.

In this challenge, one penny is used as the benchmark. But as an individual, you can fix an amount that suits your goal. Strictly following the one penny challenge will help you garner as much as £667.95 in a year. This amount is exactly 66,795 times of a penny, which is the starting amount. Essentially, this means that whatever amount you pick as the starting amount, if followed judiciously, you will raise 66,795 times of it in 365 days.

Example, if you decide to go with £5 as the starting amount, at the end of the year, you will have £5 X 66,795 = £333,975.

£667.95 savings a year sounds too low for what will make someone rich even in ten years. This is why you need to review the amount upwards if wealth creation is your goal. Also, you need to follow it up with a meticulous and periodic investment of the accrued amounts. Putting these monies into high-yielding, short or long-term investment opportunities will speed up your financial growth.

Who Can Take Up the Penny Challenge?

Virtually everyone who has any means of receiving money can partake in the penny challenge. Different age and social categories embark on the penny challenge to fulfill different objectives.

Having the money to save is one thing. Having a strong will to be consistent about it is another. The latter is where 85% of the people fail. That explains why less individuals can boast of financial success than not.

Being consistent with your savings is a habit that everyone who really wishes to excel financially must develop. So the penny saving challenge is important to the young ones as it is to adults who own businesses. The young folks, students especially, are encouraged to adopt penny challenge not necessarily to build wealth but to help them instill the habit of saving money in them early enough in their lives.

Operators of new SMEs need the penny challenge to financially transform their businesses. Most SMEs struggle with funds for their day-to-day operations. Penny challenge can just be the desired rescuer in that moment of need. If done for years with the accrued sum judiciously invested into gainful businesses, penny challenge can move from saving for personal expenses or building a money saving habit to building wealth.

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Getting Started with Your Penny Challenge

First thing first, you have to find a place for your saved money. Where will this money be kept?

Because we are talking about pennies here, bank transfers or even direct bank deposits are not in the list of options at all. But there are loads of money boxes you can choose from to make your savings convenient. Some of these include tin box, glass block boxes, wooden jar, etc.

Once the choice of piggy bank is made, the next thing to decide is how much pennies go inside as the starting amount. This amount is dependent on your financial war chest, as well as your savings goal.

Bear in mind that if you follow the challenge strictly, you are getting 66,795 times whatever amount you pick as your starting amount. Let’s assume you have chosen to start with a penny. And that you have adopted the traditional penny challenge saving method. Your routine would be as follows:

• Day 1: £0.01 – totaling £0.01
• Day 2: £0.02 – totaling £0.03
• Day 3: £0.03 – totaling £0.06
• Day 4: £0.04 – totaling £0.10
• Day 5: £0.05 – totaling £0.15
• Day 6: £0.06 – totaling £0.21
• —–
• —–
• Day 365: £3.65 – totaling £667.95

The above chart makes the penny challenge even more seamless. It will guide you through the journey. Most people prefer 1st January as their starting date. Every day, when you look at the chart, you know exactly what you are supposed to drop into the box for the day without trying to remember what was dropped yesterday.

RELATED ALSO: How to Save 10000 in a Year: 5 Steps to Get Started

What Purpose Does Penny Savings Challenge Serves?

Penny challenge makes saving money pretty less daunting. The culture of building wealth through savings is one of the oldest histories of mankind. As surely as it is for tiny seeds to grow to giant seed-bearing trees when planted in the right soil under the right conditions, many years of consistent penny challenge with tactful investment of the accrued sums can lift an individual to affluence.

However, it does not come with the sole aim of building wealth. People embark on penny saving challenge for several distinct reasons, some of which are:

• Learning how to save and understanding the gains of saving
• Saving to offset tuition fee
• Saving for picnic
• Saving for new books
• Saving to buy a special gift for a loved one. The list goes on and on.

Other Benefits of Penny Challenge

What I have learnt from a majority of those who participate in the penny challenge is that they always come back, setting a bigger challenge for themselves after the first success.

This challenge teaches you a lot more about money management than some people will learn in years of training. First, it helps you to understand how valuable a penny is. With this, you will automatically begin to see every form of wastage as terrible mistakes because each penny that leaves your hand wrongly would’ve been an asset in the piggy bank.

In a nutshell, starting and continuing the penny challenge will help you to achieve a high level of financial discipline.

Choose What Works for You

No doubt, saving regularly isn’t so easy for someone who is new to saving. For so many people, it’s not necessarily about the amount, after all, to save a penny is just as seamless as taking a sip of chilled water on a hot summer day. The problem is that the zeal and passion wane with time. You feel motivated to start a penny challenge and suddenly what felt like a gem begins to lose its relevance to you and you begin to wonder what pennies can do for you.

To succeed in the 1p challenge, you have to keep the passion alive and save regularly. Consider picking from the subsequent variations to enable you to succeed.

• Traditional 1p Challenge Saving Method:

This method allows you to start your savings with just a penny on the first day and then increase the amount by 1p on successive days.

• Reverse One Penny Challenge:

This model makes the journey easier as you go. You will save £3.65, which is the highest amount on the first day and save a penny on the last day. This means that you will reduce the amount to be saved each day by one penny.

Not only does this method help to get the hardest part off the way early in the exercise but it helps to sustain the motivation by getting your money box heavy fast enough.

• 52-Week One Penny Challenge:

This model is best for you if your daily schedule will not permit you to save daily. You’ll still save for a year but do this weekly for 52 weeks rather than daily. The final amount is the same as the daily exercise. The notable difference is that this method gives you a greater liberty to focus more on whatever keeps you busy.

Again, this method also suits those whose salaries come weekly. All you need to do as soon as the salary arrives is to put aside what you want to save and then proceed with your budget.

• Penny Challenge for Kids

It is said that any habit learnt while growing up cannot be easily forgotten. Teaching a child money management at a young age is a lifetime gift because they will grow up with higher chances of financial success.

Saving money is a healthy habit. Make out time to help the young ones understand that saving is a part and parcel of life. Demonstrates this by helping them save a penny a day for a year. At the end of the savings year, let them participate in counting the money they have saved. Also, guide them in choosing what to do with the money they have saved.

This type of thing evokes a sense of boldness and commitment in a child. If they are able to get some fine things for themselves through the savings you helped them to make, they will be motivated to save on their own when the opportunity presents itself so that they can satisfy other personal needs.

READ HERE: How the $5 Saving Challenge Can Help You Save $7,000 in a Year

Be Cautious in Your Penny Challenge Journey

A student once asked me: why is it that more than 50% of new businesses fail each year? My answer was simple: “wrong approach”.

Yes! Wrong approach backed with poor understanding of business ethics is why most businesses fail. This is also why so many people don’t succeed in their various endeavors. When setting out for your penny challenge, try not to set an unrealistic goal for yourself. This is particularly for those who want to review the starting amount upwards.

It’s important that you have a critical evaluation of your financial status before setting a target. Make sure that whatever amount you are starting with will not drain your budget in the long run.

Setting an unrealistic target can be counterproductive. What happens is that, in the course of time, this exercise will begin to gnaw away at other aspects of your life, which will make you to either stop saving or squander whatever you have saved. That’s not the right way to go.

Wrap Up

Ordinarily, to save a penny a day shouldn’t be difficult to anybody who earns any level of income. If you continue doing this for, at least, a year, you would have taught yourself the life-saving lesson of wealth creation. But a penny a day for a year may not get you there.

Certainly, a penny a day will not make you rich in a year. But developing the ability to save, knowing the importance of saving, and understanding how best to maximize your savings through investment and returns are the empowerment you need to become rich. These are exactly what the penny challenge equips you with. Start today and share the good testimony a few years to come. In whatever you do, try not to set an unrealistic target for yourself as doing so can undermine your aims and even dampen your morale.

Best of luck!