Am I crazy?

I want to save $10,000 in 365 days. I have things I want to do with the money, but first I must save it. Perhaps I am being over ambitious. Ten thousand dollars saved in a bank account is quite the under taking.

$10,000 / 365 days = $27.40 per day

That is $191.78 per week.

$833.33 per month.

How on earth am I going to do this? Here are some ideas that I have. Of course even if I don't make my goal of $10k, these ideas are going to help me save a chunk of change no matter what.

Priority #1: Credit Card use. I am a bit torn on this one. I am a big user of my Discover card. I don't use cash. Well, I rarely use cash. My Discover card has no annual fee - as of right now - and I get a minimum of 1% back on purchases. On some purchases I get 5% back. So, in the end it saves me a bit of money. The only problem is I tend to spend on stuff I don't NEED because I can - I have credit. There have been a few months when I have not been able to pay off my entire bill by the due date, which wipes out my 1-5% savings that I have accumulated by using the card in the first place.

So, what do I do? Do I continue to use my Discover card and just closely monitor my use, pay off each purchase as I make them (gotta love online bill pay), just use it for those 5% purchases? Do I not use it at all and just use my debit card?

Priority #2: Automatic savings plans. I have an online bank account with ING Direct. I like this type of account because it is out of sight. If I want to take money out of the account I must plan ahead because it takes about 3 business days to transfer the money into my regular bank account. I already do an auto deduct, but it is only a few hundred dollars a month. That money already goes towards paying my property taxes.

Revision to $10,000 in 365: I need to save $14,000 so that I can take out $4000 for property taxes.

Reality check: I probably can't save that much money in a year. $10,000 is a stretch but $14,000 is just crazy. That is 1/3 of my salary! But, just think of what our grandparents did. They had way more kids than families have today, on much smaller salaries and they still managed to save money for retirement and pay off their houses...

My goal is to start on April 1, 2010 and to go to March 31, 2011. Until then, I will continue to research and figure out how exactly I am going to pull this off.