This was the best thing I did last year - I highly recommend it I also used salary sort to chuck in the odd chunk of money (£10-£50) when I’d had a good month prior which allowed me to not see the pot balance either.
Eventually I forgot about it totally and at the end of the year I had a little over £600. I was really surprised and it paid off my PS5 with money to spare.
Big one for me is paying off my balance transfer credit card I used to get rid of my overdraft post-uni. Should be done by April and that will be my largest monthly non-rent payment gone
I’ve started putting more of my salary into investments and got personal insurance late last year. I’m quite rubbish with saving if I can see I have money left in my spending account, so I funnel it away quickly and that works better for me. The budgeting tools are more like spending trackers for me.
This year my goal is to build up an emergency fund and save more money to pay off my flat downpayment possibly in 5-8 years? The bulk of it will come out of my CPF (social security savings) but it will still be a huge amount to pay off.
Goal Number 1 - is to hopefully buy a house this year. Things are in motion so hoping to tick that off fairly promptly.
Outside of that, I’m aiming to:
Have a proper budget, and stick with it all year. (Last year I went back to YNAB, and then forgot about it about 3 months later).
I need to define some form of actual savings goal - not sure what that is yet - but will either be a hard £ figure, a revised EFund figure, or some S+S ISA goal - or a combo of the three - but likely aiming for a 10% of Salary to this goal.
Ditch the Amazon Shopping habit - I could do with some fake Amazon website that when I press “buy now” it moves a random amount of money into a Hidden Pot. (Sort of a “Shop less, and shop local” goal here).
And finally, some monetisation plan for my 3D printing hobby. As a mimimum, I’d like to sell some stuff to cover the cost of the printer.
I’d love to consolidate my hours at work to have a Friday off fully (instead of half day currently), without reducing hours, but that’s not a financial goal.
A pay rise (or new job paying more) is probably the main goal.
I’d also like to aim to double my investments this year, either through my purchasing more or them growing.
Finally, I’d like to cut my spending down more (very hard to do), and minimise my expenses as much as possible.