Savings, it isn’t an exciting word, especially when you are younger, but oh how I wished I had been a saver when I had more money to save! I have two boys and they are polar opposites when it comes to money. Maxi who has just turned eleven is a saver. He saves all his money, whereas Mini who is nine spends every single penny as soon as he gets it. It burns a hole in his pocket! One of the things I find the hardest as a mum is balancing everything. Trying to find the money to pay for everything we need and to save too.
Aviva understand that there isn’t just one type of person and to help people like me (and you) they have introduced the Aviva Financial Personality Tool.
It turns out that I am not alone in finding it hard to save as 26.5% are the same according to the future foundation. I always feel that I am trying to do my best, but often have month left at the end of my money!
Find out your financial personality
It only takes 5 minutes to find our which personality type you are using the Aviva Financial Personality Tool.
Just follow the instructions on screen and answer the questions as honostly as you can,
Then you will find out which of the 10 personality types you are. It turns out that I am a Dark Striver, which is pretty much spot on. I do sometimes treat us to a takeaway as it is a break from cooking!
Making a start at Saving
I try really hard to make our budget stretch to what we need and to avoid credit, but we have no savings to speak of at all. I worry that we are the only couple with no savings and feel as though I am always fighting against the cost of living.
Knowing that I am not the only one struggling to save has given me hope that we can become better savers and I have decided that the time has come to try and start saving and work on the premise that every penny counts. So over the course of the next month, I am going to look into ways I can save. Things I can do to reduce our spending and instead of using the savings to buy other things we need I am going to “save” the money.
I would love you to join me and help me become a smart saver and to make a start I am going to put £5 into an account now. I am also going to work harder on paying off our debts, which we still have from when I was really unwell and MadDad had to take unpaid leave.
So come and join me as I start saving. I am hoping that I can turn this month into a habit and that I can become a saver. I need your help. Share with me ways you save. What can I so to make a difference? How can I start saving and keep saving? Come back in a month for my next blog post and see how I am doing and all the things.
Disclosure: This post is in collaboration with Aviva
What a fantastic tool. This is defo something I will be recommending to my friends
I got “the enlightened one” with superpower of intuition. I am not bad with saving, and have always been like it. My sister and I are like your 2 boys – two opposites, I would always save while she would always fritter her cash on anything!
Never heard of such a tool before :)) Seems fun and worth to try 🙂 Thanks 🙂
apparently I am a Turbo Saver – which is nice as I am never Turbo in anything! 😀
I need to give this a go, I’m a rubbish saver! Daughter on the other hand loves paying money into her savings account.
It’s hard to save when you have family and often than not get unexpected purchases. I think maybe even if we manage to save few pounds it’s better than nothing.
I noticed on the budget this week they were going to give savers under 40 £1500 if they save £50 a month for 3 years, its ok but this day and age its difficult with personal circumstances. I would love to do this but i can’t see it happening, I am at the moment trying £5 a week, its not a lot but its something
Apparently I’m The Oracle – I used to be called that my my colleagues when I worked in pensions! I’m not sure about picking up the tab though as I never pay the bill!
We are mostly very good savers, but we like the odd spurlge.
We have no savings either which is a sad state of affairs really, we do put some into the children’s savings accounts each month though so they have something for the future. Trying to budget and save money where we can is how we manage, just recently our gas and electric was put up by over £40 so we changed to tariff which meant we only paid for what we spent, it’s saving us quite a few pounds at the moment so well worth a look to see if you can do something similar.
I think it is harder than ever to save and interest rates are so low too. I hope your saving plan is a success, funnily enough my kids are quite good at saving if they have something they want like a school trip to save for.
Not easy to save when you have a family is it?! I’m quietly optimistic that my ability to save will change just as soon as both daughters finish university in June. Fingers crossed x
I leave all the money to my other half as he is so good at budgeting, Will show him this to see if it an be handy for him 🙂
I’m not great at at saving as I’d rather have fun today than save for tomorrow but I know I need to get better at it x x
This is a great tool! I’ll be showing the family later!
I am a super-stretcher – fits me down to a tee!
I am a super-stretcher, apparently, Jen :-). This was a fun exercise and revealed that although I feel better when sticking to a budget and can do really well economising, I also do spend “emotionally.” So very true.xx
We used to be quite heavily in debt a few years back (joys of the credit crunch) but have paid it all off now and have a bit in savings. I think all my friends think I am crazy frugal but I’d rather wait until I can afford stuff before I buy it.
This is very useful, I really do worry about the debt we have, we bought an old house that needed too much TLC, so anything to give me some suggestions and not feel quite so aaaaahhhhabout it all is great x
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I am absolutely terrible at saving; I have great intentions but they just all go to pot when I see something that I want to buy. My two children are like chalk and cheese though; Meg is very like me in spending on anything which catches her eye whereas Eli is a saver. It’s really REALLY hard to get him to spend his pocket money!