Starting To Walk The Talk- How To Prepare For Habit Changes #AfricaSaves

If you are a regular reader of this blog, or if you follow me on Twitter, you know that we are on a  savings challenge, where for 3 months, we will change the way we spend, a week at a time.

Typically, we tend to hold our money goals in our hearts, while our hands keep reaching out for things that satisfy our immediate wants and impulses. Our first post looked at the hand versus heart conflict, and the second post had ideas on how we can meet our savings goals by identifying areas where we can save more. Assuming we are “officially” saving as much as we can in our budgets, what other areas can we reduce our spending to meet our financial goals?

As I mentioned in the previous post, to avoid “death by details”, I usually track my spending under broad headers. There is a header I call “Spending Allowance”, which is usually my pocket money, and I spend it on various things such as eating out, hygiene and personal care, occasional travel, gifts etc. I zeroed in on this broad category, and for a week, I tracked it with more detail, to see where I could save by changing my habits.  Eating out stood out. On average, my eating out habit manifests in three ways:
1. Sometimes I do not carry breakfast to work, which leads me to spending about 300 shillings on breakfast. This happens once or twice a week.

2. When I don’t carry lunch to work, I will spend at least 500 shillings per day to buy food. Why? Because when I do not have food from home, I will tend to crave fancy stuff like Hashmi’s Chooza chicken or Biriani from Swahili Plate. This happens 3-4 times a week.

3. Eating out with friends, and eating take-out on weekends with the Child. This one is even crazier, on average I will spend 2,000-3,000 a week.

From the above, you can see that I am spending between 2,000-5,000 shillings eating out every week depending on how poorly I plan.

The first two are avoidable, all I would need to do is to be a bit more orderly in planning my meals for the week, and to pack my breakfast and lunch the day before. The fact that I have a helper at home makes this even easier, all I need is a system so she can pack the lunch for me. The third is a bit dicey, because eating out over the weekend is a treat  I would not want to give up – remember, we are saving without significantly affecting our quality of life.

The Barclays Savings Calculator comes in handy, when you want to see how much you would save long term, if you changed the way you spend.

My plan is to save from my weekly “eating out allowance” until I meet my goal, which is to save 40,000 shillings in 3 months – 13 weeks towards repayment of a 100,000 shillings’ loan that I have.

This goal means I need to save at least 3,000 shillings every week. How do I do this?

For the first week, I cheated a bit. I was on vacation, fully catered for, so I saved all the money I would have spent on food during the week, 5,500 shillings in total.

Now I am back to work this week, and this is my plan:

1. For the next 1 week, I will carry all my meals. That should save me about 2,200 shillings.

2. I will reduce my eating out budget.

To be able to do this, I have to be prepared for the routine change. Remembering that a new habit is unlikely to stick unless I prepare for it.

1. Adequately planning my weekly breakfast and lunch menus, so that there always will be food to carry in the fridge.

2. Buy enough snack boxes. I have 2, and sometimes I leave both at the office kitchen, which gives me reason to buy lunch 😂😂 I need at least 6 snack boxes for the week.

3. “Migrate” some of my breakfast to the office. I will have my muesli, oats and milk at the office, so that if my carrying food plan fails, I have no excuse.

I will tell you how this plan goes by the end of the week!

How about you? How was the first week of the savings challenge? Are you still motivated to do this with me? Let us chat about it on Twitter, using the #AfricaSaves tag.

This is the third post in a series of sponsored posts for the BARCLAYS SAVINGS CHALLENGE. I hope the challenge has so far been interesting for you as it has been for me. You can follow the discussion on Twitter and Facebook and share your own experience using the hashtag #AfricaSaves . Visit this page for useful savings calculators and information on their savings accounts.