What's your money saving plans for this year?

Money saving plans, love them or hate them, they are important when it comes to reaching our saving goals. I talked about why we have decided to make 2017 the year to save big and our reasons behind it. What I didn't expect was how that post became a popular post with readers wanting to find out more information and how to plan to save big this year. This week we will talk about money saving plans and how to make them work.

I said it before that I would be sharing our money saving plans on how to save big this year and since I also said I wanted my saving big journey not to be about us but also about you. This saving journey year is not just about saving but learning and finding ways that help us save money.

What is the plan to start making 2017 the year to save big? What are we planning on doing to make this happening? Are we going extreme with this saving challenge? Are we going to do monthly money challenges? The questions and when my husband realized I posted about he said I took it to the next level now!

The month of January we decided to freeze our spending and take the time to plan the rest of the year. Again, this is something I recommend people do instead of deciding that January 1st they will start saving when they have no clue or have created a budget on they will start saving money. This is one of the main reasons saving money as a New Year's resolution fails the majority of the time.

To begin our year to save we started with a money saving challenges, a spending freeze! I have written about a spending freeze and gave some helpful ways even to survive it, but the truth is that freezing your spending will help you save money. We didn't spend much that we only saved like $14 with Digit during the month of January.

We didn't use our debit or bank account much because we didn't spend much money, so we didn't save the normal amount we normally do with Digit. So how do we begin the year of saving big? Good question and this is why we decided to take an entire month to plan and get ready to execute.

How to create a money saving plan to help you save big

Communication

Communicating is critical when it comes to creating successful money saving plans. As a team, we have to express ourselves and communicate about our finances. We know that we need to save money; we want to save money, but how are we going to do this and at what level of intensity?

What are we willing to sacrifice to save money this year? How are we doing and what is our purpose? We need to ask ourselves these questions because we both need a purpose and a goal to reach. We are very goal oriented when it comes to our finances, and we want to make sure that both of us are on the same page.

During our year of saving communication is going to be very important and we want to make sure that we both understand that. My husband doesn't want to go back to the gazelle intensity we did when we were killing my debt and saving for me to quit my job, and honestly I understand. He does want to have a consistent amount of money to be put away in different accounts.

I don't want to spend my Sunday's cutting coupons and eating beans and rice every day to save a penny, and I don't want to sacrifice our going out once a month with the family to save money. See how communication works! We both express our concern and listen to one another.

Create a Saving Goal

Now that we established that communication is #1 we are going to go ahead and start creating our financial goal for the year. When we are creating this money saving plans for 2017, we want to have the answers to these questions answered:

• What are we saving for?
• What is our target date?
• How much is this going to cost?
• What is the game plan?

While creating our saving goal we decided that we were going to find ways to make some extra cash by taking side jobs (he fixes PCs on the side) and I will concentrate on making money online and using that money to increase our savings. We will continue to take $20 from our main checking into our CapitalOne360 checking account and will use that money for Christmas and subscriptions.

What we need to work on right away is our “Just in Case” account which took a beating last year. Our emergency fund is fully funded to where we want it right now. So our focus for the month of February will be to increase our JIC account to $1500. Now, I didn't say we were going to have it done by the end of the month. I said we were going to focus on getting our account to $1500 first.

To execute, we decided to keep Digit and keep going with it. I seriously recommend you check this application out because you will save money with it.

Now you are starting to see how we create our money saving plans in our home. Now, you might have a different system, but you are starting to see our saving plans coming alive.

Budget

Once we established our goals our next step is to look at our budget; I will be honest and say that our budget is not the same budget as when we started budgeting. The truth is that a budget can't stay the same and look the same. Our budgets changes as we grow financially and family size.

When creating your budget remember that no personal budget is alike; stop comparing your budget to others. Creating your budget is when we have, to be honest with ourselves and sometimes it may hurt. You will see where your money has been going and the reality might be that you might be overspending and eating out. Another quick tip is to keep your budget organized to help you keep track of your money.

A way to create successful money saving plans is to make your budget work for you and continue to adjust it to suit your saving plans. Remember this is not a race and it will take time if this is your first time creating a budget.

Conclusion

You hears how we create money saving plans and what are plans are for this year, but we would love to hear from you! To help us help you and to motivate each other if you can please take this survey below.

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