What is this site about, anyway?

A Dollar a Day is a new saving plan that I have put in place for 2008. The goal is to see just how much money I can save in a year by taking little tiny steps.

There are two components to this plan.

1. As you can probably tell from the title, the first step is to save one dollar a day. That means in 2008, I will save a minimum of $366 with this plan (2008 is a leap year).

2. The second part of the plan is a bit more complicated. I plan to save all the money that I otherwise would have spent. Well, duh, you say. Whatever you don’t spend, you save. Obviously. No, here, the plan is to start making good choices. Normally when I go to the mall, for example, I get a bubble tea on my way home. So every time I go to the mall and don’t get the bubble tea? The cost of that tea goes into savings. Also, any time I buy something that is cheaper than what I normally buy, I will put whatever I save into savings. To continue with the beverage example, if I go for coffee and I would normally get a large coffee, and instead I get a medium or a small, I also will save the difference between the two costs. Other rules will be added as I go along. Follow along and see!

What am I going to do with all of this money? I don’t actually know. I’ll see where it is at the end of the year. Maybe it will go into savings or into a vacation fund or maybe it will be part of my Roth IRA contribution for 2008. Who knows!

How will I keep track of everything? That was actually something I struggled with. I’m planning to open a separate ING Direct Savings Account for $1 a day part. For the other savings, I have not decided whether or not this will involve a physical move of money. Once a month, I will transfer the savings from that month into the savings account. I will track everything in a spreadsheet. Why not transfer on a daily basis? Primarily because most savings account have a limit on the number of times you can withdraw from your savings account per month.

So there you have it. The basic plan. Anyone want to join me in this adventure?

Megan Smith

Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:

In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance.  It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information.  It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck.  While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.

While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.

Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.

So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan.  I needed to budget.  I needed to know what I was spending my money on.  I needed to prepare for the future.

I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way.  I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.