Another Money Game

I've been reading as many PF (personal finance) blogs as I have time to read lately. There are so many and I'm amazed. Most of them have some pretty interesting ideas for saving money or paying off debt.

One I was reading yesterday talked about saving $3/day. He would put $1/day in each of three piles. One pile was for investing, one for saving and one for giving away (charity). He did this for 139 days straight. From time to time he would take some of the charity pile with him and give it to homeless people or give it as a tip to people who didn't usually get tips.

After 139 days he started putting $25/week into an OSA (online savings account), where it could earn interest. I guess this takes the place of the savings pile. After that amount grew to $1,000 he took about half of it out and started trading stocks. Now he is also satisfying the requirement of the investing pile. What I didn't understand was where did the charity pile go?

While I don't think trading stocks is for me - I do like the idea of saving $3/day. His money seemed to grow faster when he put in the OSA each week instead of letting it sit in three piles on his desk. I know that there wasn't much of a difference, but with an OSA you can go online and instantly see how much you have. It would be easier for me to forget how much was in the three piles and sort of dismiss them as significant savings. The flip side is that it seems easier to save $3/day than to put $25/week into a savings account.

I'm going to add this to my list of money games. I've been keeping a list of money games to try. I'm going to try one each month. This month's money game is saving all the $5 bills that I get. It's going okay. The biggest problem is that I don't usually use cash. I usually swipe my debit card. I did take out my allowance in cash this month, so it's been interesting. Sometimes I go out of my way to avoid getting $5 bills. Then I start to think that I'm only sabotaging myself and I start to laugh. It's amazing to me how much I hate spending my cash.