Let’s face it. When it comes to saving money, most of us are coming up short, especially in these difficult economic times.
But saving has never been easier for Gaynelle Marshall and Tedroy Clarke, thanks to the five-dollar bill.
These two have been squirreling away all their five-dollar bills and it has been paying off.
“It all started with Charmaine Burns, who told us she had been saving these five-dollar bills,” Tedroy said.
“I decided to try it in January and it got me a plane ticket to New York and Canada, and spending money.”
Tedroy admitted that he was amazed at how much money he was able to accumulate but he just kept on saving.
“Now I get so excited when I see one,” he said, laughing.
For Gaynelle, the simplicity of this savings plan and the ease of doing it was what she loved most.
“I only started from the end of March this year. The pioneer of this is Charmaine. When she first gave me her story of how she started doing it, which was long before Tedroy, I was like okay but at the time I didn’t see the need to do it,” Gaynelle revealed.
“When she explained how she as a single mother needed to find a way to send her daughter to Cuba to pursue her studies and find ways of getting her to and from Barbados during vacations – and not necessarily making more money – she had to start looking at what was happening with her money and at first she started with two dollars but then she upped it to five because the five dollars got her there faster.
“To me, it’s really a remarkable example of how much power we have in our hands but we just don’t tap into it.”
After Tedroy told Gaynelle how much he was able to save, she got off the sidelines and started stashing away her five-dollar bills.
“That’s when I became aware of how many five-dollar bills pass through your hands,” she added.
“So if you just put them aside, next thing you know you start to accumulate.”
The one caveat to this five-dollar savings plan is that if you happen to take any money out of the savings, you have to put it back with interest.
“Between the end of March and beginning of July, I had accumulated $635 dollars,” Gaynelle said.
“But if you told me to put aside $635, I would not have known where to get this money from. So I didn’t have a specific goal in mind at the time, but a friend of mine was in the island and Limegrove had something delicious and suddenly I was able to get it.
“For those who knew of what Tedroy and Charmaine and I were doing, seeing something tangible at the end was what prompted [them] to give it a try.”
Both Gaynelle and Tedroy tout the ease of this savings option and the change in spending it has brought to their lives.
“It’s really unobtrusive . . . you don’t feel cheated at all,” Gaynelle said.
“You feel cheated if you don’t get a five-dollar bill. You covet these five-dollar bills.”
What this has done for these Starcom co-workers is change their attitude towards saving from something they’ve wanted to do to something they have to do.
“It’s small, so you don’t really miss a five-dollar bill,” Gaynelle said.
“What really intimidates people about saving is, you think you have to save huge chunks at a time. Yeah, there was a time when I was able to do that and those times have long gone, but I still have to save.”
Gaynelle added that people see saving as money they’re not able to spend, so they feel cheated.
“It was important to me to set a goal [because] unless you have something to work towards, your drive for wanting to do this naturally diminishes,” she said.
“It has to be for something. So for the woman who spotted a fabulous piece of jewellery that she knows she can’t pay for all at once, you can get it once you’re patient and steady about your savings plan.”
Both Gaynelle and Tedroy know first-hand that those five dollars can pay huge dividends.
“There’s no rule that you can’t augment the five dollars with something else,” she said.
“If I find in a week I haven’t accumulated a lot of five dollar bills, I throw in a $20. As long as you’re not spending what’s there, you can put in as much as you like.
“I think we have to get out of this notion that treating yourself to things amounts to frivolity. You still have to have something to look at for you, something that says I’m doing this for a reason, it cannot be [just] for paying bills.
“It also makes it easier in these harsh economic times, so you won’t feel like you’ll never enjoy nice things again.”