Are you sick of never having any money? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a comma in your bank statement one of these days? Even if you’re living paycheck to paycheck right now, I can teach you how to save up $1,000 in just four weeks.
No lie. If you’re reading this post and you desperately want to see your account jump to one thousand dollars, then read on my friend.
This is step one in Dave Ramsey’s 7-step plan to becoming wealthy – saving up a $1,000 baby emergency fund. For many, it can be the most difficult step since there’s never any money left at the end of the month.
Many of my personal finance friends give the advice, “Get a second job and put that money in the bank.” Well you know what? Sometimes life just isn’t that easy.
Maybe you’re a single mom that can’t pay for sitters all day every day. Maybe you’re not healthy enough to work 70 hours a week. Maybe you have eight other responsibilities that you’re juggling and working another job just just isn’t going to happen!
You need a thousand bucks, but you just can’t possibly work a second job.
So what do you do?
Here’s your 4-step plan to save up $1,000 in just 4 weeks:
1) Sell Your Stuff
No matter how broke you are, you still have things that you can sell. EVERYTHING has a value (seriously – remember the guy that was selling all of his personal possessions to basically be a nomad? He was able to sell EVERYTHING – even his half-used bottle of mustard!!). Your stuff is typically WAY more valuable than you think.
When I look around my house, I could easily come up with $200 worth of stuff that I could sell on Craigslist:
Old smartphone – $50
Under-the-cupboard mount for knives – $25
Entertainment center – $40
Old movies we never watch – $20
Clothing/Accessories (yes, I’m voluntarily selling my wife’s stuff in this example) – $50
Jewelry – $100
Total = $285
Here’s the trick. Get an empty cardboard box. Then walk through every single room in the house and pick out a few items from each room that you really don’t need, and that someone else would pay money for. Put them in the box. At the end of your scavenger hunt, you should have a pretty full box of stuff!
List all the items on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, and let the selling begin! I figure you can earn at least $250 this way.
2) Sell Stuff For Your Friends
In step one, you sold your own stuff. You thought it was going to royally suck, but it was actually kind of fun wasn’t it? You don’t really miss your junk, and now you have a wad of cash in your pocket!
Well your friends are probably just as unenthused as you were about selling your stuff. If they’re like most people, they just don’t want to go through the hassle of listing items, meeting up with people, and collecting the money. What I found is that they’ll GLADLY pay you 25% of the money if you do the legwork for them.
Have them gather up their baseball cards, gently used shoes, hardly-used baby toys, and picture frames. Anything that you think has value, encourage them to box up and send ’em your way. Sell $250 of stuff for each of your four friends and you’ll earn yourself $250! BOOM!
3) Cut Your Budget
Alright, so you thought going through and selling your old stuff was dreaded! Now I’m mentioning the “B” word?! Ughh! How unfair is life? (I hope you noted the sarcasm… 😉 ). The truth is, setting up a budget and understanding your spending can be an incredibly freeing feeling.
When you lay out all your spending and really start looking at it, you’ll be amazed at where your money is really going. You’ll start to question purchases you made and you’ll also be surprised by how much you spend each month on items that you barely think about!
Once you put on the lenses of the “saver” instead of the “let’s have some fun with this money in the moment”, you’ll quickly find $250 that you can cut out of your budget without hardly noticing.
Need some help getting started? I’ve got free budget tools and resources to help you get started.
4) Learn to Buy and Sell
You may not realize it, but there are people out there that earn a living by simply buying and selling stuff.
Like….a GOOD living! Meaning, $60,000 a year or more!
Here’s what they do. They take a look at the garage sales in the area, target the ones with products they’re interested in, buy them for pennies (because the sellers really just want to get rid of their stuff – and they CERTAINLY don’t want to haul anything back inside at the end of the day!), and then list those exact same items on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace for 5X what they bought them for just hours before.
They do this hundreds, if not thousands of times a year – earning an extra $5-$50 on each item (depending on what it is and on how good of a bargain they got it for).
If there are people earning $60,000 a year, I know that you could earn a measly $250!
You Just Saved up $1,000. Now What?
There you go, you did it! You just saved up $1,000! But now what? What are the next steps?
First of all, DON’T SPEND IT!
I’ve seen it time and time again where people that typically don’t have money and suddenly found some, end up wasting it on crap and quickly find themselves without money again.
You’re smarter than this.
You worked hard for this $1,000, so let’s use it to get ultra-wealthy!
The next step to riches (and seriously, you’re closer than you might think right now, so don’t give up) is getting out of debt. Here’s the post that will help get you there: The Absolute Best Way to Get Rid of Debt.
Are you on your way to saving up $1,000? Tell me about your success below!
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