Put in a tiny bit of effort each week and be £1,000 richer this year!
Next Monday sees the start of the week when many people begin reducing their Christmas debts with their January pay packets, and good Fools take the time to appraise their budgets for the next twelve months.
It's also when Lunch Money Week starts. The premise is simple: you make your own lunch and save money on sandwiches. Instead of £5 or £6 on lunch each day, you spend more like £1 per day on ingredients.
I eat a lot. If I bought ready meals or sandwiches every lunch, I'd need to remortgage my house. (Worse: I don't own a house, so I'd have to buy a house and then remortgage it.) To put it another, way, at lunchtime I get gawped at by my editor and other Fools, who stand over my shoulder watching me eat, like tourists at some curious exhibit. I quite lose my appetite. Well, almost.
Anyway, Lunch Money Week serves two purposes. Firstly, it gets you saving more and spending less. Secondly, it's for charity. The idea is that you donate the first week's savings to a good cause. Picking a cause you have empathy for will get you suitably motivated to start this particular saving habit, which means the cause ends up helping you to save. Nice, huh?
If you don't have a favourite cause, there's always The Fool's latest charity efforts. In less than five weeks time, three of us at TMF HQ are taking on the mighty Kilimanjaro for poverty charity WorldVision. This charity's main goals are to educate people about poverty and to enrich the poor, which makes up two-thirds of our catchphrase: "To educate, amuse and enrich". Sadly there's nothing amusing about poverty, but we might all have a laugh about it when we've helped wipe it out.
We three mountaineers are TMFNumbers (our bean counter), TMFTarantula (our customer services guy) and TMFVertigo (me). I just hope my nickname is not an omen. You can read more about our cause here.
After choosing your charity, you need to find some recipes. I cook two roasts on a Sunday and make salads throughout the week, but many people don't like meat quite so much! You could get other ideas by asking the friendly folk on our Recipes/Cooking discussion board.
I reckon that most people should save an extra £10 to £20 a week this way, or £500 to £1,000 per year if you're disciplined. That'll get most of you out of your overdraft by next Christmas! If every visitor to Fool.co.uk this month donates £10, that'll be about £5m to charity, or more than £6m if we use Gift Aid! If we all continue to save as much for ourselves each week, by the end of this year we'll have saved a massive £240m!
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