Anyone done the 1p saving challenge?

[Discontentedpony]

Has anyone done this successfully?

I really like the idea - I already save money each month but it seems like a really easy way to put money away for Christmas.

The thing that's stopping me is how to do it. Logging in everyday to my bank to transfer tiny amounts of change is daft and I don't think HSBC are set up to do this automatically.

Has anyone done it and if so how did you put the money away?

Lloyds bank does a save the change option if you want to switch banks i know nothing about other banks doing it though. It automatically rounds up to the nearest pound and puts the pennies straight into a savings account and honestly im often amazed when i see £5 in a week.

Halifax do the save the change thing too. When I was buying lunch every day at work I was saving a small fortune compared to now where I am working at home making my own lunch doing one big online shop every 10 days, I’m lucky if it’s £2-3 a month now, but it does add up. I have a current account and a ‘saver account’ and it just rounds up the card transactions to the next pound and dumps that rounded up bit into the savings.

What about something like Plum?

I don't see the point of any of these gimmicky saving schemes.

You've obviously identified the first downside of the 1p challenge in the faff factor, the other being that the majority of the money is saved in the last month and almost everyone will have given up by then and if they haven't, they're far less likely to have the few quid a day spare in December than they are the few pence in January.

You can get to the same endpoint of saving £300 for Christmas by setting up a standing order for £30 or whatever it is a month and forgetting about it.

Likewise the save the change apps. If you don't save the change, it just builds up in your current account, so you can move money manually, or again set up a standing order.

It doesn't actually magic up free money, as people seem to believe by the way these ideas are promoted, it just shifts your money around.

Monzo do this automatically, rounds the pennies up to the nearest pound and puts them in a pot. I call it my rainy day pot 😁 before WFH i had £10 at end of each month. I used to transfer all the random change at the end of the day too. So if I had as an example £80.63p at the end of day I would transfer the 63p to my savings account.
It does work but you need to be strict

Those who do these things find them fun and the constant interaction/thinking about saving is motivating.

If you don't think you'll enjoy that, why not just set up a standing order?

I decided to last year, then the logistics annoyed me

So instead I set up a new savings account t and move money over every week; doing it in small amounts rather than large made it pain free.

I’ve squirrelled away well over £1000 this year doing that.

Thank for your comments. I do already put as much money away every month as I can but i liked the idea of an insignificant sum adding up to nice little sum at the end of the year.

I did it once, but in reverse, so I started saving the higher amounts and worked my way down throughout the year. The last thing I wanted was for my saving amount to increase the closer we got to Christmas.