Saving and investing money is much easier said than done, and for many of us it can often feel stressful trying to even find enough to get started with. Wonder where your money goes each month, and find yourself increasingly living from paycheck to paycheck? To help make things a little bit more fun while you get started in 2021, we’ve compiled a short list of ways to gamify money saving. Read on, and see if there’s some advice that can help you to take your finances to the next level!
Understanding your finances
Before getting started with some of the different gamification options, it’s important that you get a firm grip on your financial situation, and understand it a bit better. This will help you to optimize your outgoings, cutting back on the things that you don’t need to be spending out on as regularly and then potentially allocating that money into something more productive.
To make it a little bit more fun, why not try using one of the many different smartphone apps out there when saving your money? Categorizing and analyzing your financial data with a piece of software such as Plum, for example, can help you to visualize your money in a clear way, and financial advisory services such as Cleo give you friendly financial advice based on your spending habits and outgoing expenditures. These sorts of options are completely free to install and use alongside the normal games and social media apps you’d have on your phone, so you might as well give them a shot!
Money saving challenges
Find it challenging trying to put money away incrementally in a pot, or struggle to find the motivation to cordon off money when payday comes around. Why not try one of the different savings challenges popularize by different money-centric bloggers online? The 1P savings challenge, for example, is a fun idea that has you saving away a mere penny at the start of the year, increasing every day so that you reach £3.65 by New Year’s Eve, saving just under £670 – Not too shabby!
Another example of this game is the 52-week savings challenge, where you start with one pound and end by saving 52. As it gets to Christmas time these games can be quite harsh on the wallet, but it’s all about getting yourself into a better savings habit, and so hopefully by the time those bigger challenges come along you’ll be ready to tackle them head-on.
Learning to invest for the future
Managing to get on top of your spending a little bit more, and want to start looking into an investment strategy in order to put your money back to work for you? You might decide to start with a small investment savings app such as MoneyBox to invest small amounts on your behalf, or even experiment with one of the many different free stock market game simulations. In fact, most of the major trading platforms give you the ability to ‘practice’, without putting any actual money in.
Want to learn about something a little more substantial and long-term? RWinvest offer a wide range of online guides, videos and podcasts on the thriving property market, so you can quite easily start learning about property investment as you go about your normal lockdown routine.