Piggy banks don’t just need to be for kids. Did you know that you can trick yourself into saving big money by simply holding yourself to a weekly deposit to a savings jar?

The concept in simple.

Starting with a dollar on day 1 and adding a dollar to that amount every week for 52 weeks you end up with a stunning $1378 in the bank.

That’s a nice vacation for you and your family!

The concept reminds me of an old story of a wise man given the choice of either 1 million grains of rice or given 1 grain of rice which sum doubles for each square on a chess board.

While intuitively 1 million grains of rice sounds like a lot, the final sum if you were to do this works out to be 18,446,744,073,709,551,615.

That’s a lot of rice! More than that of which currently will or has ever existed on planet earth.

Now while this would be impossible to adopt to a savings plan it gives you an idea of the psychology of adding a dollar a week to your savings goal. It may not seem like a lot but trust me you will find yourself with a nice sum of money in the end.

While this will get challenging in the later weeks, don’t worry so much about always making your goal. Simply wait until you achieved what you need to save for the week and cross it off. Luckily there are some great resources online which can help.

Also, while it might be nice to have that much cash on hand there’s nothing stopping you from doing this all entirely within a savings account at your bank.

Print this off and post it to your fridge (or somewhere you can see).

One final note about someone who “failed” to do this.

Lastly, I’d like to point out that you need not despair if you aren’t successful in reaching that number in 52 weeks. A friend of mine did this up until week 40. He stopped there at $820 and used that money to go on vacation for the summer. Did he fail?

Absolutely not.

He successfully saved 820 dollars!

It’s all a matter of perspective. Trick yourself into saving money!

Do you do something like this? Sound off in the comments!