$5K is no small amount–so trying to save that within 2 months can be a challenge unless you are a pretty high income earner, or have hardly any expenses.
Chance are, if you’re reading this, you are neither of those things. So we need to come up with a strategy to hit the $5K target and we have 60 days to do it.
Given the tight turnaround–we need to attack this problem from both the income side and the expense side of the equation.
I’ll start with the expense cutting and we can go from there.
The Most Impactful Part of the Budget to Address
There’s no denying that saving $5K in two months will be an epic challenge–especially if you’re not already dialed in with your savings habits.
Here’s some things to consider to get the ball moving fast:
-Car equity
-Food Budget
-Housing
Selling the car to save $5,000
Do you have a paid for car, or at least a car with some equity in it? To get to 5 grand fast, you might be able to sell your car and at least eliminate a monthly payment. For the sake of argument, let’s say you have $6K in equity in your car.
If you sell your car, you will raise $6K–but you still need a car to get around. Here’s what you can do:
Sell your car, then take half of the cash and buy another car for $3000. Now, before you freak out and tell me you can’t buy a car for 3 grand–I’d challenge that thinking.
Of course you can.
My car right now is worth about 2 grand. It runs good and will likely go another year or two without too many issues.
If I wanted to sell this car, the next person to get it would be getting a solid ride for a measly 2 grand–so it’s out there.
Selling a car that has a super high payment, then taking the equity you have in the car to buy another one for cash, and eliminating that monthly payment is one of the best way to save a ton of money quickly.
In my scenario, we’d have about $3,000 assuming it took us 30 days to sell the car. So we’ve got 3,000–now we need to find some other ways to get to the $5K mark.
Cutting food costs to get closer to the 5K goal
Ok, this one surprised me when I first started getting control of my budget.
I was spending minimum of 5 grand per month, up to 7 or 8 grand per month–without even realizing what was happening.
A large part of my mysterious spending had to do with my grocery bill.
Now, I was not buying a ton of luxury grocery items. I was buying a normal amount of food, for two adults, at a relatively low cost grocery store.
I was spending anywhere from $700-800 per month consistently.
I got fed up with that, as it seemed unreasonably high to me.
So I started doing two things:
- Shopping at discount grocers like Aldi
- Buying everything I need at once and avoiding the “stopping at the store on the way home” habits
Shopping at a discounter is an obvious choice. My typical grocery haul went from $200-250 to $140.
This was a big savings, and I was arguably eating more healthy anyway.
This amounted to a savings for me of around $200-300 per month.
Avoiding the whole “stop here for this or that” one-off grocery runs also allowed me to avoid over-spending. Those little stops add up. You need to bite the bullet, get everything at once, see the numbers, and don’t go back for a couple weeks.
That’s the only way to beat back the grocery spending.
Again, with this scenario we would have gotten to a savings of about $500 over the course of 2 months.
If you’re keeping track of our running tally–this would get us to a savings of total of ~$3500 over the course of two months.
This leaves us needing to find another $1500 over the course of 60 days to hit our goal.
Again–a lot of what you can do will depend on your income, and how much you’ve got going out for housing. Housing costs are hard to adjust with just 2 months of time–so you might have to dip into another bag of tricks to get to the magic number of $5,000.
It’s time to fire up a nice little side hustle!
Side Hustles to Get to 5K Fast
First thing we need to do is figure out what skills we have that we can trade for money.
What are you uniquely good at that others would be willing to pay you for? It’s time to figure that out.
If you don’t have anything you can point to–it might be time to level up in the skill department. That will help you longer after you’ve raised the 5 grand that you need.
Here are some high income skills you can consider cultivating for the long term:
- Graphic design (make things look pretty on the computer)
- Programming / Software Development
- Marketing
- Audio Editing
- Video Editing
Taking these ideas one step further and turning them into practical side hustles (that you can get started with fairly quickly):
- Creating Pinterest graphics for a startup company (this can be done with Canva–no special software needed)
- Learn to code an Alexa voice skill and list your services on Upwork (takes less than 60 days to learn how to do this)
- Create an email marketing program for a company that helps them nurture their customer list (can be done by learning a popular email marketing service like ActiveCampaign)
- Reach out to your favorite podcaster and offer your audio editing services (can be done once you learn the skill). Ditto for the video editing / Youtuber.
Make your property work for you
Chances aren’t super high that you’ll be able to learn a totally new skill and find a willing customer all within 2 months, so in order to get to 5 grand saved in 60 days, we’re going to need to make your property work for you somewhat passively.
Allow me to expand your mind a bit:
Dog Sitting : A Hugely Lucrative Side Hustle
Did you know apps like Rover.com exist now where you can offer to watch dogs in the comfort of your own home?
Did you know that this can also pay between $50-100 per day? Yes, you read that right. Depending on the demand in your area, you could make a killing just boarding dogs for the day (and night) while the owners are off on vacation.
Don’t believe me? I just took a look in my local area for what it would cost for me to board a medium-sized dog over the Thanksgiving holiday.
The top result was for $55 per night on Rover.com
If we take $55 per night and assume we can land bookings for 10 nights per month–that’s an extra $1100 saved that we didn’t have before over the course of 2 months.
If you’re keeping track–adding the dog boarding side-hustle to your income brings you to within a few hundred bucks of hitting our goal of saving $5000 within 2 months.
AirBnb: Time to Rent That Spare Room
If dog sitting isn’t your thing, you can consider renting out a room in your house to raise the extra money.
Depending on your house and the location, you could get anywhere from $30 to over $100 per night just to rent out part of your house on Airbnb.
Look, this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea either–but you can spin it up fast and start bringing in money without tracking down clients, or taking on a new job on the weekends–all of which take time to ramp up.
Time to Get it Done–How Will You Save $5K?
There’s a lot of ways to get to your 5 grand goal. Hopefully this sparks some ideas for you on your journey.
Now, go forward and get it done! Good luck!