Martin Lewis 1p challenge can help you save £600 before next Christmas

Christmas - it's the most wonderful time of the year. That is, until you factor in just how much it costs.

From an immaculate feast of turkey with all the trimmings to snapping up the perfect gift and paying £12 for a Yorkshire pudding wrap at the Christmas markets, it really adds up.

And, with the cost of living crisis affecting us all, the pressure to spend big this festive season is giving us more stress than ever before.

But what if you could save a massive £600 by this time next year?

The 1p challenge is backed by the Money Saving Expert himself, Martin Lewis, who spoke about it on his ITV show back in 2021.

He said: "There’s a big savings community out there who do this, it’s called the 1p Challenge.

"Basically, you save a penny on the first day of the year in a jar or piggy bank, 2p on the second, 3p on the third and keep going throughout the year - by the last day of December you’re saving £3.65, so that would give you £667.95 in total.”

As outlined above, the saving challenge is incredibly simple to follow and starts with just 1p.

So, if you wanted to start it on 1 January, you’d put 1p aside that day; then on 2 January, you’d put 2p away; on the 3 January, set 3p aside; and… well you get the idea, you add an extra penny each day so by the end of the month you’d have saved £4.96 in total.

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Continue on, adding an extra penny to the amount each day, and by 31 December 2023 you'll have saved £667.95. Seems easy enough, right?

If you don’t tend to have the pennies then you could set up a savings account with your bank and transfer the cash over directly.

And if the idea of transferring teeny amounts every day seems a bit too much effort, then the Money Saving Expert has worked out how much you’d need to put away each month in total, meaning you could simply transfer these amounts across on pay day each month - or whatever works for you:

January - £4.96

February - £12.74

March - £23.25

April - £31.65

May - £42.16

June - £49.95

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July - £61.07

August - £70.68

September - £77.55

October - £89.59

November - £95.85

December - £108.50

It's a simple as that and will hopefully making next year's Christmas shopping a little less stressful. We can't promise it'll put a stop to the family arguments across the dinner table though...