Archive for August, 2008:
Stickk.com - Put a contract on yourself to save money!
I just discovered Stickk.com the other day. It’s a site that literally allows you to put a contract on yourself to do something you want to stick to. You can vow to lose weight, save $100 every month, stop impulse spending, start recycling, and so on.
The site is free to join, and your “commitment contract,” as it is called, can be either financial or non-financial in nature. If you choose to make it a financial obligation, you can actually “put your money where your mouth is” if you want – and be forced to pay up if you don’t achieve your goal. You provide the site with your credit card information and you will actually be billed if you fail. Talk about incentive to be successful!
For your goal to be deemed successful (either a one-time success or a weekly success at a longer-term goal), either you or your designated “referee” has to confirm to the site that you did indeed meet your goal. Now, I suppose you could always lie if you failed and didn’t want to pay up, but where’s the fun in that?
The best part is you can choose who you pay up to — either another person, or you can have the money donated to a charity or “anti-charity” (the George W. Bush Presidential Library, for example).
So head over to Stickk.com and start a contract on yourself. Maybe you can vow to start stashing a certain amount of money every month, or maybe you want to start using coupons on every shopping trip. Whatever it is, I wish you the best of luck!
