This 52-Week Saving Challenge Could Help You End 2023 a Lot Richer

Saving a little bit of money every week could add up to a lot of extra cash over time.

If you're hoping to put more money into your savings account this year, there are lots of ways to do that. One option is to try to make the process of saving fun. And you can do that easily by participating in a savings challenge.

Specifically, there's a 52-week saving challenge many people like to do each year that will enable you to make saving into a game.

While it's a simple and easy challenge to take part in, you'll be surprised at how much extra money it will net you before year's end.

How does the 52-week challenge work?

The 52-week saving challenge is one of the simplest challenges that you can do at the start of the new year. That's because it gets you off to an easy start but you build up your efforts over time.

With the 52-week challenge, here's what you do. In the first week of the year, you save $1. In the second week, you save $2 and in the third week, you save $3. You then continue to add an extra dollar onto the amount you save every single week as the year goes on. So, in the 40th week of the year, you'd be saving $40 and in week 52, you'd put $52 into your savings account.

At the end of the 52 week saving challenge, if you have kept up with the process every single week, you would end up having saved a total of $1,378 during the course of the year. That's not a bad sum of money -- especially since many of the contributions that you will be making during the early part of the year are very low and are thus very easy to find the money for.

There are plenty of printable checklists you can find online to participate in the challenge so you can mark off each week that you make the desired contribution. Or you can create your own method of tracking your efforts.

You can also decide if you want to transfer the saved amount into a high-yield savings account each week as you contribute; if you want to manually put the money in a jar somewhere; or if you want to wait until the end of the month and move the previous four weeks' contributions over into savings all at once (although that last approach can make it harder to stick with your plan since you're losing the consistency of the weekly contributions).

Is the 52-week savings challenge right for you?

The 52-week challenge isn't going to change your financial life by itself. It's a fun game that can make saving seem more effortless and actually entertaining rather than feeling like a huge sacrifice you have to make all the time.

While you shouldn't do this challenge as a substitute for making meaningful financial progress on your goals, there's no reason not to at least start it when the first week of 2023 comes along. See how you do, and you may be surprised that it's easy to stick with it and you end the year with over $1,000 in extra money in your savings account.