Gamifying and Achieving Your Financial Goals

From Duolingo’s daily streaks to Apple Watch’s activity rings to the classic coffee shop punch card, gamification is everywhere. By applying the core elements of games to everyday goals, these tools tap into our natural reward system to drive motivation and consistency. The same approach can be a game-changer for your financial goals, which often lack built-in incentives and can be easy to procrastinate on or view negatively. And games themselves have a long history of engaging people through reward and participation. In fact, the first recorded board game dates back to around 2,500 B.C., and the fundamental principles that made those early games compelling are the same ones at work today. At their core, nearly all games share the following three elements:

• • Objectives or Goals
  • Competition
  • Rewards

Let’s take chess as an example. The objective of chess is clear: to checkmate your opponent’s king. The competition is your opponent — they’re not just going to let you win! Their efforts push you to improve your own performance. If you’re able to deliver checkmate, you’re rewarded with a win and the positive feedback loop for your strategy and effort. It makes you want to play again!

What is Gamification?

Gamifying concepts, or gamification, is the process of applying game-like elements to real-life activities. It has proven to be an effective strategy for increasing motivation and engagement for tasks that don’t naturally or clearly offer the core game elements.

For example, household chores are often a boring and mundane task, leading to low motivation and procrastination. In this case, while the objective (completing the chore) is clear, competition and rewards are typically missing (or at least not emphasized). So, how can we gamify this to boost engagement?

Suppose we implement a points-based system. Each chore will now be assigned a specific number of points: Cleaning the dishes yields 2 points, taking out the trash is worth 3 points, and so on.

As the week progresses, each family member tallies points by completing chores. This introduces competition, as there is a sense of urgency and motivation to stay ahead. At the end of the week, the person with the most points could be rewarded by choosing the movie for family movie night.

We can already see in the brief example above how gamifying chores can increase motivation and engagement, ultimately leading to a higher likelihood of accomplishment.

How Can We Gamify Financial Goals?

The process is quite similar! As mentioned, the key is to incorporate the core game elements into real-life activities, which taps into the natural human reward system. Financial discipline, by its nature, can be a challenging and evasive task. Two of the most common financial goals are to increase savings and reduce non-essential spending. Let’s look at how we can gamify each of these goals to increase chances of success.

1. Increase Monthly Savings: Savings BINGO

Incorporating the key elements of Bingo with the following example can help result in sustained and consistent savings. You can create a Bingo card with different savings amounts listed in each square, or use the one we’ve prepared for you here. Each week (or at the frequency of your choosing), select a square at random and try to save that amount. At the end of the week, if accomplished, mark off the square. Keep going until you get “Bingo”, and then you can start a new card with even higher savings targets!

This method provides:

• A goal (get “Bingo,” thereby helping to achieve your savings targets)
• Competition (varied savings targets)
• A sense of reward with each completed square or Bingo win

2. Reduce Non-Essential Spending: No Spend Streak

Streak tracking is a powerful motivator that leverages the internal reward system (as mentioned above, the popular language learning app, Duolingo, utilizes this motivator very well!). In this example, you can track each day that you are able to reduce (or eliminate entirely) a non-essential purchase. Suppose you and a group of friends want to cut down on dining out expenses. For each day someone avoids dining out, they mark off a tally. You can then reward the person with the longest streak or highest tally at the end of each month.

This method introduces:

• A goal (achieve the longest streak or most tallies, thereby helping to reduce dining out expenses)
• Competition (with the group)
• Rewards for the winner at the end of the month

Just ensure the reward aligns with your financial goals. Selecting dining out as the reward would be counterproductive to your objective. Instead, consider something like a game night of the winner’s choice.

And don’t be afraid to get creative with how you track your streaks! Bullet journaling is another great option — simply design a habit tracker page in a notebook, draw out a grid for the month, and color in each successful day. The act of physically filling in a box can itself become a satisfying practice in repetition that reinforces your commitment, and looking back on a completed page at the end of the month serves as a rewarding visual reminder of your progress.

The Takeaway

Many financial goals don’t inherently have game elements built in, which can lead to procrastination or viewing them through a negative or restrictive lens. Gamification can significantly boost motivation and engagement by appealing to your internal reward system while also making achieving your financial goals more fun. If you’re struggling to achieve success when it comes to your financial goals, consider applying elements of games to help you get there. And, of course, we’re always here for a chat.