Money Saving Experts Come Up With '1p Challenge' That Could Save You Hundreds of Pounds This Year

After the inevitable blowout over the festive period, January's the time of year where we're looking for any way to save ourselves from eating instant noodles daily until our next payday.

Now website PlayPennies has come up with a very useful and doable way to save money, and all it involves is saving an extra penny for every day of 2018.

It sounds deceptively simple, but if you do it right, the challenge will help you save £700 for Christmas 2018 while still giving you the room to get the drinks in on the regular. Sounds like a plan, right?

PA

The scheme works by putting away one penny on the first day of the year and adding an extra penny to that every day in 2018.

Given that it's 7 January now, you'd have to start with a first payment of 28p - hardly a figure that's going to blow the bank (unless you really overdid it at the end of 2017).

If you stick to this for the rest of the year, on 31 December you should put £3.65 into your account, bringing the total amount you've saved in 2018 to £667.95. Not a little bad haul, is it?

If you're really worried about having £3.65 spare come Christmas time, you can always work backwards and start with the big payments, counting down towards that sweet final payment of 1p at the end of the year.

via GIPHY

While this little money saving challenge may be more modest than other challenges - like this one which can save you £1,456 - it shows that even just putting a few pennies away can make a massive difference by the end of the year.

If you're anything like the average Christmas shopper, you might well need the extra boost come Christmas this year as people spent literally billions while Christmas shopping last year.

People spent an eye-watering £4.5bn on Boxing Day sales in the UK last year as shops slashed by prices by up to 90% in a bid to make one last push for profit before the New Year.

Other huge shopping days last year included Black Friday - when UK shoppers spent £2.6bn - and the last Saturday before Christmas when people blew £1.67 billion on last minute prezzies.

So why not give this little challenge a shot? You might be thanking yourself come December.

Topics: Christmas, Money, Interesting, Finance, Community

Chris Ogden

Chris Ogden is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from the University of East Anglia with degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing before completing his NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism. Chris has previously written for the independent culture magazine The Skinny, among other publications.

@TheThumbCompass