If your goal in 2023 is to save money, then why not try out the envelope challenge?
To get you started, you’ll need 100 empty envelopes - then label each one with a cash amount from £1 to £100.
Each week, you pick two envelopes at random and then you save however much is written on the envelopes.
If you’re picking out two envelopes a week, you’ll finish the challenge in 50 weeks - so just under one year.
If you don’t skip any envelopes, the most you’ll save is £5,050.
If you wished you'd have started last week, to mark the New Year and have the money saved up by Christmas, you could pick four envelopes this week to catch up.
You should be aware that some weeks you could end up needing to put away quite a bit - for example, if you pull out the £99 and £100 envelopes in one week.
If you worry you’ll struggle to save this much, you can reduce the challenge to 50 envelopes and you would still put away £1,275.
You could also lower the amounts on the envelopes, so you could save in multiples of 50p instead of £1.
Or instead of pulling out two envelopes each week, you could decide to do just one envelope - although this will take longer.
Very few people carry much cash around nowadays, which is ideally how you’re meant to complete this challenge.
However, if you don’t really use coins and notes, you can set up a bank account to deposit the money into each week.
With the digital method, you could put bits of paper labelled 1 to 100 into a jar, then pull two out each week to see how much to deposit into the account.
If the envelope challenge doesn't take your fancy, there are plenty of other fun ways to save cash.
There is the 1p challenge, which sees the amount you save increase by 1p each day.
If you start this on January 1, you would save 1p, then 2p on January 2 and 3p on January 3 - all the way through to £3.65 on December 31.
If you carry on until the end of the year, you’ll have saved up £667.95 in total.
It isn't too late to catch up on the days you've missed - you would just need to save 78p today, then start the challenge properly from tomorrow.
So this would mean 13p saved on January 13, then 14p on January 14, and so on.
We've rounded up five money saving challenges here.
