Shortly after my husband and I switched to diehard frugal mode and started accumulating savings to buy our first motorhome, I went down a rabbit hole of personal finance content. Every day on my way to and back from work I was either reading a blog post, or watiching a youtube video, or devouring a book to learn more about how to optimise my income, my time, and my savings.
As you might have read from my previous article, my husband and I started aggressively saving for a motorhome, and we have successfully stashed £10,000 since September 2021, on average salaries. Pretty cool huh! Did we increase our income? No, not really. Did we learn how to spend less? You betcha. We would never have been able to do this without our trusty budget planner journal.
A key factor to achieve this milestone was gaining a deep awareness of how we were spending our money every single day. If you have ever arrived a few days short of payday asking yourself: where the heck did my money go?! then you might want to continue reading, as I will share the exact method I used to set up a budget planner book.
The 30th April 2022 marks the day where my husband and I managed to save 10k in less than a year: a whopping £10,000 since September 2021, when we had around £1,500 in our savings account.
September was the month where we decided we were going to buy a motorhome, so we got our asses into gear and set out our savings strategy. It has been a wonderful learning experience, and we have both felt empowered by re-discovering how much more control over our habits we had than what we thought, and a sense of renewed motivation in seeing our efforts getting us closer and closer every month to our savings goal.
Nothing that I am about to write about is ground-breaking, however, my hope is that in this climate of economic doom, it may help you find the motivation to take control of what you can, pick a savings goal, and start working towards it little by little.