Mum's Viral Envelope Hack Saves £5,050 In Less Than Half A Year

The trick, which has become known online as the '100 Envelope Challenge', requires a set of 100 envelopes - each labelled up from £1 to £100, or a denomination of your choice.

You then take 25 weeks and draw two envelopes twice a week (or four per week) at random.

Whatever the figure you draw, you have to deposit that amount of cash. That means that if you pull out the £35 envelope, for example, you've got to stick £35 in it, and so on and so forth.

Obviously, this whole thing requires you to have the kind of disposable income to put away a sum of anywhere between £10 and £394 a week, but if you're the kind of person who has that, and is maybe guilty of splashing the cash rather than sticking it away for a rainy day, this could be the trick for you to save some dough.

By the time you reach the 25th week, there will be £5,050 - or whatever denomination you've set yourself - sitting in those envelopes ready for you to collect.

The whole thing is based on a mathematical formula developed by the 18th-century German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who realised that if you split the number one to 50, and then 51 to 100 into two groups, you can add them together to reach 101.

That means that one plus 100 is 101, as is two plus 99, and so on.

So, the total of the two groups is therefore 50 times 101, or 5,050.

Of course, you probably don't have to do this over 25 weeks, unless you need to save a load of money really quickly - that's just the suggestion behind the viral challenge.

Equally, you could do it in 25 days by choosing four envelopes per day if you're feeling really flush.

It's something to think about if you're saving to buy a house, that's for sure.

The hack was shared by a mum a few months ago on Facebook, who wrote: "If you have a three-year plan to buy a house, you could have a little over $30,000 for a down payment by doing this."

Since she shared it, the tip has been liked thousands and thousands of times, with the comments proving many people think it's a great idea.

One told a friend: "We should do this! It would help me save."

Another commented: "I love this idea. It would be a fun way for us to save up for something special."

However - as we've said - this idea only works if you're in a position to deposit those sorts of amounts on a bi-weekly basis.

A third person said: "Okay but you gotta have that extra money first."

Either way, it's something to think about if you've got a big saving target in the distance.