The 52-Week Savings Challenge is a popular financial goal designed to help people build a significant nest egg through gradual, manageable increases.
The core philosophy is to gamify the process of saving by starting with a small, almost unnoticeable amount and increasing that deposit by a fixed increment every cycle.
By "warming up" your savings muscles in the early stages, you build the discipline required to handle the larger contributions that occur toward the end of the year.
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Use the calculator below to work out your weekly/monthly deposits.
You can use this tool in 3 ways:
Whichever way you go you'll be presented with a table that has either the weekly or monthly breakdown on it.
You can export this table to .csv file and open it in Excel, Numbers or GoogleSheets to keep track of things offline or you can bookmark this site and track your progress here (uses Local Storage, no Cookies so the site knows nothing about you and can't track you!).
You can click the reset button and begin again at any time 👍🏽
Set a goal, track your progress, and save for the future.
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This challenge relies on arithmetic progression rather than interest-based compounding but the "compounding" effect is felt in the rapid growth of the total balance. You can set the calculator to use a pre-set amount to get a flavour of how it works.
For example, in the Classic $1 Challenge, you save $1 in Week 1, $2 in Week 2, and so on. While your largest single deposit is only $52, the cumulative effect results in $1,378 by year-end.
If you scale this up a bit and do things by increments of $15 per week, for example, your first deposit is $15.00 and your last in week 52 is $780.00.
If you set a Target Goal to save then you can see how much to save every week or month. If you want to save $5000 for example, your first week's deposit is $3.63 and your final deposit in week 52 is $188.oo. If you did it monthly then it's $64.10 in month 1 and $769.23 in month 12.
Ready to get saving? Let's do this!
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