How To Save $5000 in 100 days.
It’s funny how we are surrounded by numbers. For the math gals and guys that took a math course that contained sequence and series, they all remember the famous sum of first n positive numbers.
It is simply adding up the first n numbers, n being of your choosing.
To add the first 5 positive non-zero numbers, you do 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 which sums up to 15.
Apparently the concept has been used to save money long before people even took arithmetic series seriously.
To save $5000, the trick is to buy a pack of 100 envelopes from a Dollar Store ( if you live in the US), or Dollarama store ( if you live in Canada). If you live elsewhere, you can go to the your local store that sells envelopes. Get a pack of 100, or several packs that sum up to at least a 100 envelopes.
The location where the envelopes are bought is really not that important. You do not even have to buy them from a store that sells things at a cheap price. However since the goal is to save money, hence the suggestion.
On day 1 of your saving spree, save $1. Then on day 2 save $2, on day 3, save $3, …, and on so on, then on day 100 save $100.
At the 100th day, you will end up with over $5000 total saved. Mathematically speaking, you will end up with exactly $5050.
There is a formula for the sum of first n terms in an arithmetic series. Some books use the word arithmetic progression.
For the rest of this article, we will stick to arithmetic series.
An arithmetic series is just a list of numbers ( positive or negative), that have a common difference between any two consecutive numbers in the series. The numbers could be in increasing or decreasing order. What matters is the common difference rule, it has to be constant for any two consecutive terms.
The formula for the sum of first positive n numbers is given by
Get Franklin Nkokam Ngongang’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Sn=n(n+1)/2
For n = 100, we get 100 x (100 + 1) / 2 = 101 x 50 = 5050
If the US or Canadian dollar is not your local currency, it applies to your currency too.
Now, there is a catch. The catch happens if you start saving from the lowest amounts. When you get to the bigger amounts, it gets harder, and harder, and … harder ( pun intended ) and it is really easy to give up.
Les(Leslie Calvin) Brown one of the greatest motivational speaker of our era has a quote: “If you DO what is EASY, Your Life will be HARD!!”.
Personally I do not always like doing the things that are hard either.
Doing the hard stuff will imply saving $100, then $99, then $98, …, down till $2, then the final $1. Kudos to you if you can do it that way.
I personally prefer to mix-and-match, or do a hybrid of hard and easy.
First of all, we must do a "little" something everyday.
Then since we want to reach our goal of saving $5000, save an amount greater than $50 today, then tomorrow save an amount less than $50.
It’s like splitting the work load into two, then chewing a difficult chunk on one day, then an easy chunk on the following day.
That will be my way to go about it.
Please share your thought.
I’d be glad to know how you think or if you have a better way.
Thank you.
