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Saving money isn’t your favorite activity in the world. It’s much more fun to spend it. Saving it is difficult, frustrating and at the very least, boring. You always feel like abandoning your savings goal soon after you start.
What if it didn’t have to be boring? What if it could be fun? You can change your perspective on saving money by gamifying the experience. Gamification is a great strategy for sticking with daily habits, learning new languages and tackling chores around the house. So, why not try gamifying your savings goals?
Read ahead to find out how.
Divide Up Your Goal
Most video games don’t have a singular challenge for players to beat. They have a series of small challenges that build up to larger ones until they face the final boss and win the game.
If you only give yourself one big goal to tackle, you can get intimidated, discouraged or even bored by it and end up abandoning it. Dividing up your goal into smaller challenges will feel easier to manage, and it will help you stay motivated to keep going. Say that your ultimate goal is to save up $2000 in an emergency fund. Divide this into smaller goals, like saving $200, $400, $600, etc., until you reach $2000.
Watch Your Progress
When you play a video game, you can see clear signs of the progress you’ve made. You can see your character’s level and the experience points you’ve collected over your hours of gameplay. Seeing this progress feels great and inspires you to continue.
You can do this with your savings! Download one of the top budgeting apps on your smartphone or computer and then fill out a personal budget. Many of these apps will sync with your bank accounts, so you’ll have a clear view of how much you’ve added to your savings account every month. Certain apps will also help you track your saving progress with graphs and charts.
Get Friends Involved
Not all games are meant to be played solo. Multiplayer games get you to gather a group of friends (and in some cases, complete strangers) to tackle challenges as a team or to face each other as competitors. The company makes the game better!
So, don’t keep your savings goal a secret. Tell your friends! Your friends can hold you accountable and keep you motivated to stick with your savings goals. They can also help you tap into your competitive side! Your friends could also try to collect their own savings, aspiring to reach their goal first. Some healthy competition could push you to get to your goal before everyone else.
Reward Yourself
Video games come with lots of rewards, keeping you invigorated to push further and move on to the next level.
So, set up some rewards whenever you hit a savings milestone. These rewards shouldn’t be very expensive — this could sabotage your savings goals. Pick rewards that are relatively inexpensive but satisfying, like going out to see a movie or taking yourself out to lunch.
What Should You Save Up For?
Before you start saving up money for a summer vacation or an exciting shopping spree, you should save for an emergency fund. An emergency fund is a financial safety net that everyone should have sitting in a bank account. Whenever an urgent and unplanned expense surfaces, you don’t have to worry about how you can afford to pay it off. You can make the necessary withdrawal from your emergency fund and handle the expense immediately.
Without an emergency fund, you may need to consider alternative payment methods for covering urgent, unplanned expenses. One alternative in this scenario is an online loan. You’ll want to choose an online provider that has a fast loan application process so that you can manage your emergency as quickly as possible. If your application is approved, you can access your borrowed funds and use them to pay off your urgent, unplanned expense. Afterward, you can repay your online loan through a straightforward billing cycle. It’s that simple.
Saving money doesn’t have to be so hard. When you follow these tips and turn it into a game, suddenly saving will be a lot easier to do!
