Saving money with Smarty Pig!
I’m basically writing this post to get an extra entry in Smarty Pig‘s Back to School Cash giveaway in the hopes that I can add a little bit ($100) or a lot ($1000) to Celeste’s back to school fund. It was a long hard fall last year applying to high schools but it paid off for Celeste (and me) because she was accepted into Talent Unlimited’s musical theatre program. In NYC, public high schools are admissions based which means you have to apply for the high schools you want to go to. Each high school has its own admissions criteria and depending on the high school, a prospective student may need to take a test, prepare a portfolio, do an interview or audition in addition to meeting admissions criteria like grades or state test scores. It’s a hard process that involved doing something many evenings a week and almost every weekend last fall. To motivate Celeste, I promised that I would give her a certain amount of money for clothes depending on the school she got into. She got into her third pick for schools so I am giving her $400 to spend on clothes. Thankfully she’s very thrifty and some of that will probably be tucked away for the $20 a bag used clothes sales at Housing Works where she’s gotten probably $2000 worth of clothes for $20 but I know she will want to spend most of it before school so I am saving money little by little in Smarty Pig so that I have it all by the end of the summer.
Smarty Pig has been a great way for Eric and I to save money for different things. We already had an ING account but that didn’t allow us to differentiate for different things we’re saving for and have different accounts so when I heard about Smarty Pig, I thought I’d give it a try and it’s great. The interest rate is very competitive (1.1% or so) and I can have as many different goals as I want. Right now we are both saving for 2011 taxes (sucks) and for more fun things like going to DEMF (Detroit Electronic Music Festival) next year and getting VIP tickets and we’re also saving for a trip to Prague in Christmas 2012. I plan on adding goals as we do better financially and putting most of my raise in savings after we’ve paid down some of our debt. It really helps to be able to see the separate goals and how they’re doing.
