Curveball Accounts and No-Spend-Days

I was reading this great blog article on Making Money Make Sense and a line popped out at me:

Assigning one day a week as a no-spend day may wake you up to all the ways money disappears, while shoring up your bank account.

What?!?

A day of no-spending? Could we do that once a week?

I think it would take a ton of planning on our parts. Even thought we have cut WAY back in the last few years, we still get a little willy-nilly with our lifestyle. Not in the spending thousands of dollars way, but in the “I made a plan for dinner tonight and we bought the groceries, but now it is hot and can’t we just got get $1 tacos instead” kind of way.

So maybe we should try this…

Another thought that popped from the article is the concept of  a Curveball account. While my husband and I have some savings accounts that are for when we overspend or for a special event that is coming up (like our vacation next week – squeeeeeee!), I haven’t thought of an account like this where the spending is more intentional for things that don’t quite fit in the emergency category. I think I need to convert our “Regular Savings” account into this and start taking money out of it when we don’t stay in budget because a special thing (for which we weren’t able to plan) comes up. I think that would keep us a little more honest.

And, I think that we could be more intentional about how we save. Right now, I have a certain amount of money come out of our paychecks, but what if we tried something like this:

So the next time you save 50¢ on a coupon, go home and drop that 50¢ into a I’m-a-smart-shopper Jar and then deposit all those savings to your Curveball Account at the end of the month.

How cool would that be?

Thanks to Gail for the great article!

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