It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of starting small with personal finance. Not everybody can afford to start big, or even what average people are able to do. And that’s okay. Sometimes starting small is all you can do.

I know that we couldn’t afford to start saving money with even a dollar, that’s why I did 99 cents. It was only a cent less than a dollar, but psychologically, it made it seem less dramatic. We were spending way more money than we brought in each month and most of it was just wasted on stuff. We still couldn’t afford to save the 99 cents because we were already behind each paycheck, but I did it anyway.

Sometimes making small sacrifices can pay off big time. It did with us. That weekly transfer of 99 cents got the ball moving, and over time—it grew and grew into better finances. It took work and it sucked, but every single second, every effort and sacrifice were worth more than we gave up.

We went from saving 99 cents per week to saving a total of $4.00 every week day over the last few years. Of course other things have been done to save money and improve our finances, but I’m just talking about daily transfers right now.

$4.00/day breakdown:

$2.00/day goes to our Car Insurance Fund (we use this to save up our car insurance premiums so that we can save money by paying in full every 6 months)

$1.00/day goes to our Emergency Fund

$1.00/day goes to our Christmas Fund (I just started this one last January, but it sure made Christmas shopping a lot less stressful this year)

So with each bi-weekly paycheck, we were saving $40.00. 10 week days in a 2 week period. It took some getting used to and now I’m ready to ramp it up again.

This year, we have 2 main financial priorities: pay cash for a second car and a bathroom makeover. Of the two, the second car comes first and most likely will be the only one we accomplish this year.

Having a second car is going to mean higher car insurance costs, so to get started, I’m going to increase our daily transfer from $2.00 to $2.50. It’s not a lot, but it adds up. I’m hoping to be able to increase this to $3.00 around June or so, but it depends on how well I can adjust our budget.

I’m also adding a new daily transfer of $2.00 to our Car Expenses Fund. Our Car Expenses Fund is supposed to be for any repairs that come up or things we can’t afford to take care of out of the paycheck. I figured it would be a good place to save money for our second car.

In addition to those changes, I’m also adding a $1.00 daily transfer to our House Fund. We’re going to need money for house stuff anyway, and I can also save the money for the bathroom makeover in there. We can always transfer money out if we’re short on cash for the car. Keeping them separate helps me focus on the big picture though.

New Daily Transfers Breakdown:

$2.50 to Car Insurance Fund

$1.00 to Emergency Fund

$1.00 to Christmas Fund

$2.00 to Car Expenses Fund

$1.00 to House Fund

That’s $7.50 in daily transfers each business day, $37.50 each week and a total of $75.00 for each bi-weekly paycheck.

That’s almost twice as much as we were doing before, for the last year. It’s going to be a big adjustment every paycheck and I’m not sure if we can keep it up. I hope so, but I don’t know what will happen.

On a side note, we’re finally in the habit of putting $25.00 from each paycheck into our Roth IRA, so between Roth IRA contributions and Capital One 360 (formerly ING Direct) Daily Transfers, that’s $100.00 from each paycheck automatically gone.

It’s taken a long time and a ton of work to get to this point, but it’s been worth it.

Do you use daily or weekly transfers to reach your financial goals?