Dry January is a personal challenge where you abstain from drinking any alcohol for the first month of the year. It can be a real test of willpower after spending weeks indulging for the winter holidays, which tend to be filled with glasses of champagne, boozy punches and spiked eggnog.
Dry January can lead to a whole host of health benefits. Cutting out alcohol, even temporarily, can improve your physical health. It can make it easier to get a good night’s sleep. It can increase your energy levels during the day. And, instead of nursing a terrible hangover in bed on your weekends, you’ll be out and about, enjoying your time off work.
If these benefits aren’t enough to encourage you to try Dry January, maybe this one will: it could put a chunk of savings in your pocket. Find out how.
Saving on Drinks:
The most obvious way that you’ll save money is by abstaining from alcoholic drinks. Depending on your drinking habits, this could be a lot of savings. For example, if you had two $5 pints of beer per day, you would be spending $70 on beer by the end of the week (not including tips). By the end of the month, you’d spend almost $300 on beer. That’s a lot of money to keep in your pockets.
Saving on Entry Fees:
Do you tend to go out drinking at nightclubs? Well, if you skip these types of spaces for the next month, you can avoid spending money on entry fees and coat check fees. Those funds will stay in your wallet.
Saving on Rideshares:
You can’t exactly drive yourself home when you’ve gone out drinking. So, you usually find yourself ordering an Uber, a Lyft or a taxi service to get home.
During Dry January, you can skip this expense! If you’re not out drinking, you can safely drive yourself back home. You don’t have to pay for rideshares or worry about surge pricing. And if you decide to stay in for the night instead of going out, you can save on gas and parking, too! This could be the best time of year to embrace your inner homebody and curl up on your couch.
Saving on Impulse Purchases:
Alcohol impairs a lot of your decision-making abilities, including your decision-making about money. You are more likely to open your wallet and buy something on pure impulse than if you were stone-cold sober. These impulse purchases could be fast food orders when you’re feeling hungry, but you can’t be bothered to scrape a meal together at home, or they could be online shopping orders that you don’t remember making until the packages arrive at your doorstep a week later.
What To Do with Your Savings
Once the month is done and you’re finished with the challenge, you should put all of those savings to good use. Don’t use the savings to splurge on cocktails — use it to start an emergency fund. An emergency fund is a safety net that everyone should have sitting in a savings account, just in case an urgent and unplanned expense comes their way. They can withdraw from the emergency fund and handle the expense without breaking a sweat.
Without an emergency fund, you might struggle to cover an urgent and unplanned expense out of pocket. You might need to turn to a different payment solution, like a personal loan online. Emergency expenses are good reasons to get a personal loan online — after all, you can’t ignore emergencies and wait for when you have more savings to pay for them. You have to handle them right away. An online personal loan could be just the thing to help you do that.
Challenge yourself to go dry this January. It could boost your health and your savings all at once!
