A bumper year for Saturday Savers Club

Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash

It's been a bumper year for Saturday Savers Club. We're just coming to the close of our fourth year with record numbers of savers, savings goals achieved and, right now, fourteen candidates put forward by their peers for Saver of the Year Awards, our largest field ever.

I love the nominations every year. We keep it simple: put forward your nominations and the reason why you are nominating them. The reasons are always heartwarming and sometimes they make you laugh out loud as well.

The bar for joining the Club is very low: set your goals when you join and turn up each week to let us know how you're getting on in a comment. Savers started writing posts as well as commenting to record their progress, and then taking part in HPUD, with a chance to be sponsored for an HSBI.

Everyone can choose how they want to save. The Club uses the 365 Penny A Day Challenge (save 1p on Day 1, 2p on Day 2 and so on, up to 365p on Day 365) as a framework and some Savers follow along. Savers have also gone backwards or selectively, according to what they can do at the time and, sometimes, just for the fun of it.

This past year has been more adventurous: for a long time, @hoosie ran Savers of the Week, highlighting four Savers posts which benefitted from a share of author rewards and, amazingly and all down to the generosity of other Savers paying it forward, five HSBI each, every week.

We also tried a new initiative: a subscription savings plan to buy SPI, an investment and growth token, over forty weeks using the recurrent payments feature in PeakD and other front ends. We've had two rounds with fourteen savers taking part, the first round finished this week. There were no defaulters and it was very easy to run, taking up about half an hour every four weeks. About 520 SPI have been sold this way, involving 2,520 HIVE.

Every year, we've had a couple of no-buy months. In reality, they are more low-buy or controlled spending months. Participants set out their personal rules for the month, what they can and can't spend after essential expenses (usually home-related, food and transport). People can do a tally at the end with a calculation of how much they've saved: sometimes, it's extraordinary.

But every little helps: other Savers have aimed to do one or two things differently, maybe taking packed lunches to work. One Saver decided to have groceries delivered rather than trekking to the supermarket with her four children. She kept her purchases to the minimum threshold and moved other items to next week's order. There were no additional items to keep the children happy/quiet either. There were some big savings!

We've planned next year differently, with Savers working together to agree a programme and extra features like buddies to support new Savers and pulling in helpful posts from elsewhere on Hive. It's been great putting ideas together.

Next year will be interesting as we're likely to see much more volatility in the price of Hive. It'll be a good year for learning how to manage the ups and downs of crypto!

_{Page dividers courtesy of @barge | Saturday Savers banner by @raj808}