Oh Christmas pig, Oh Christmas pig!

"Christmas Pig" by Justin Belcher

Here’s a quick little idea I had that I wanted to share.

I have a routine where I empty my wallet daily and put the ones in a little box. I use the ones to pay the kids’ allowances. Sometimes, I have enough ones in there to pay allowances for a month and sometimes I have just enough for the week. It depends on how much cash I’m using, but it overall has helped me always have money on hand to pay them and that’s been a real sanity saver and guilt curber.

I’ve wanted to use more cash more often because I think it limits me better than a card does and I’d like to get in the habit of going cash only for 90% of my day to day expenses.

Now, I have an incentive to do that.

I have a piggy bank.

Every time my wallet looks huge and gross, I empty the coins out into it. I wasn’t really sure what to do with the money this year.

But now I do.

I came up with a little incentive to dump my change into my piggy bank. My change is going to buy my Christmas present to myself. It’s not going to go towards my Christmas present, it will pay for my Christmas present in full.

What’ll it be? Depends on how much money my little piggy’s got when I cash it out at the end of the year.

I figure this will help me in a couple ways.

1) I want to use cash as much as possible as we head into the chaos of the end of the year. I behave so much better when I know I can only buy x amount of dollars worth of stuff because there’s only x amount of dollars in my wallet. With the little plastic card thing, it gets fuzzy. I know I only have x amount of dollars to spend on y thing but I don’t know know, you know? Anyhow using more cash inevitably leads to more cha-ching, cha-ching for the little piggy wiggy.

2) It’ll curb satisfying the wanties. Or at least delay it. And then I won’t be dipping into any other type of money to satisfy the holiday wanties. I think the reason the wanties really kick into gear around the end of the year is because we get absolutely bombed with advertising and subconscious messages to want things that are shiny and bright. Not to mention, most of us shop for gifts and just in doing so we are exposed to things. I’m a sucker for things. Nice, pretty, lovely things.

3) I’ll be doing something for me and it’s not of negative consequence on anything else. Not to mention, I’m a single mom of three wee ones. If I don’t spoil me, no one else will and that’s completely fine with me.

So, I’ll be focused on feeding my pig and fattening him up for my totally self-indulgent Christmas slaughter.

Do you have any totally ridiculous silly little games you play to motivate yourself? Don’t you think my piggy bank needs a name? Should I take a picture of him to encourage a pig-naming brainstorming session?

P.S. Do take a moment to read the article I linked to up there. It is amazing.