Are you stuck in an eternal loop of income and expenditure? Have you tried all other avenues for saving money to no avail? Want to learn bullet journal savings tracker ideas to get your savings jar off the ground?
Then you are in the right place, for today we will be exploring 10 great tips to take into your savings endeavors.
1. Savings Jar
If you are more of a visual learner and thinker, then you are going to want to capitalize on this when you save money. Bullet journaling can help with that, allowing you to pictorially render your act of saving money, in this instance by drawing a savings jar (or piggy bank) within which you store your money.
Not only can you visually store your money here, but you can also delineate and make note of your savings goals, using this as a template for how to save effectively and what to save towards.
2. Simple Bullet
Of course, if you are less visually inclined or artistically inclined, then perhaps you might want to try something different. The simple BuJo tracker is something that anyone with a stable set of bullet journal supplies can do to track savings.
All you need to do is delineate your page into a bunch of squares and you will have all you need to get saving effectively. Fill these squares with sums of money - these can be exactly the same if you are looking to add to a savings account on a regular basis, or indeed they can be different; bullet journal ideas are entirely yours for designing.
Just as with a gratitude journal, the beauty is in fitting it to you.
3. Gaming
Perhaps you are one of the more mischievous money-savers, in which case savings trackers will not be of any use to you. Unless, of course, they are game to start saving money - literally.
Yes, you really can keep your monthly savings goal (or goals as the case may be) by playing a game with yourself to make it more engaging! Some have used the Monopoly game to make saving more engaging, wherein you roll a die and honor the amount that the square you land on tells you to save each week.
4. Monthly Money Saving Challenge
As a testament to just how specific you can make a bullet journal, we take the example of Karen, an office worker who wanted to save on the excess amount of money she was spending on lunch each day.
She endeavored to bring her own lunch to work and made a note of each of the days of the week that she did not achieve this goal. In this way, she could then look back on each of those days in retrospect and question more accurately why that had been the case.
5. Holiday Saving
It seems that every single holiday season is spent worrying about credit card debt more than actually enjoying what is supposed to be the most wonderful time of year.
But if you used a bullet journal to, say, start a spending tracker and savings tracker early on in the year, then surely you would not need to worry about spending when the time came to splurge and engage in the capitalist entertainment matrix, right?
Instead of questioning what the heck it's all for in the first place, why not prepare yourself in advance and curb your spending habits (especially if you are buying stuff that actually matters)?
6. Get Artistic
Exercising the creative side of your brain is a great way to lull yourself into a false sense of security, thus letting down your barriers and allowing you to connect yourself with yourself.
This is perfect for those who are already more artistically inclined and perhaps less able to grapple with the part of themselves more dedicated to organization and the like. Yes, you really can just trick yourself into being organized, and it is as simple as doing some drawing and coloring.
7. Full-Year
If you want to get really in-depth about it, you can track your savings over the course of a year. With such a close glance at a particular point in time, it can be difficult to keep track of the kind of spending habits that elapse over the course of a year, or even to watch as these spending habits evolve over a longer period of time.
This is where using a full-year bullet journal savings tracker can really do your spending habits some justice, catching them in the act and allowing you to modify your bad habits for the better.
8. Something Specific
Perhaps you are saving up for one or two specific things and have no real use for a bullet journal savings tracker otherwise. In such a case, it would be foolish to just use a whole leather journal to explore this one thing, right? Why not, instead, make a mural of this one thing so that you never forget precisely where your financial frugality is headed?
If you are one of those more visually-minded people from earlier, then this really is your time to shine!
9. Tickets
Though you could easily use this method for anything you are saving for, this is definitely effective when you are saving towards some tickets or something relatively big.
You might, for example, use it to save towards a wedding, calling a visual representation of that thing to mind and conveying it to your bullet journal. Equally, you could use such a method to save towards a birthday party, a holiday, a new home, or even some tickets to a concert you have always dreamed of seeing.
After all, despite how big the stadiums are and how slight your connection can be with the band on display, the tickets are awfully expensive, aren't they?
10. Big Goals
Again, the more visually-minded bullet journal users will be rejoicing, for here we conclude this list by encouraging you to make a big and visually-pleasing list of your big goals.
Try dividing them using the S.M.A.R.T system:
- Specific - using action words and asking who? what? when? where? why?
- Measurable - ensuring that your goals are actually trackable and not abstract or ephemeral.
- Attainable - goals should be challenging but possible and within your power.
- Relevant - goals should meet your needs (so you should know your motivations)
- Time - such goals need a time limit, or else you could be at them forever
Final Words
So, there you have it! Hopefully, you are now feeling ready and able to put some pennies aside and save whatever you are attempting to save.
FAQs Bullet Journal Savings Tracker
HOW DO YOU TRACK SAVINGS IN A BULLET JOURNAL?
The best thing about a bullet journal is that you can make it just how you want it. The space is there for you to utterly personalize however you wish and to cater it precisely to how you work best.
HOW DOES A BULLET JOURNAL TRACK EXPENSES?
A bullet journal is essentially just another way of using paper to categorize and compartmentalize your thoughts and life. Specifically, a bullet journal attempts to strike a balance between work and play, and savings occupy the liminal ground in-between those two aspects of life that are often less and less clearly delineated.
HOW DO YOU MAKE A SAVINGS JOURNAL?
To make a savings journal, you follow the same sort of advice that you might with any other journal, though this time focusing your efforts on your finances instead. Seriously, do you really need a source such as this to create a savings journal? Might you, instead, be better just diving into yourself and using yourself as inspiration? Are you really so null in the head that you need some random source on the internet to tell you what to do?
HOW CAN I TRACK MY SAVINGS PROGRESS?
There are plenty of different methods that you can employ to keep better track of your savings progress. If you are more visually minded, then your methodology will likely be more inclined towards pictorially representing your savings, whether literally or metaphorically. The same goes for whether you remember and learn better by reading.
