Who is Bob and how can he help me?

Saving money is a long standing and arguably very sensible habit, but sometimes the most sensible of things can be a bit boring!

Over the years all sorts of methods have been invented; from jam jars to piggy banks and we have all used them in different ways. About 18 months ago My FD Jon Hall and I were on the till in our Great Dunmow branch, an activity that senior management here are encouraged to do from time to time, as it gives us a great opportunity to meet our customers and find out how well, or not the society is doing in our members minds. A lady came in that day with about half a dozen different account passbooks, each one with sticker identifying what that particular savings pot was for. One for holidays, one for kids, one for emergency bills, one for clothes ….. you get the idea. I asked her why she did this; she simply wanted to allocate various savings to various goals and keep them separate in an easily manageable way.

This got us thinking and as we already had some consumer research on savings underway, this concept was thrown into the pot. The research which ran over a series of events, including a facebook style online community of over 300 people, all pointed us in one direction. It is easier to save money when you have a specific goal in mind.

Goals were the key, but other things shone through that would help. The use of modern technology to make managing the goals more straight forward, the ability to personalise your savings accounts to match goals, it should be fun and include some hints, tips and motivation. These insights and a whole bunch of other feedback led us to create Bob.

Bob fronts our new goal based savings tool, which anyone can use for free from our website. He and his helpers with assist with amongst other things, budgeting, creation and management of your personal goals and providing that little extra motivation to stretch yourself to achieve those goals as soon as you want to.

We also provide a series of savings “pots” that name each of your goals and keep the funds for each one separate, but all viewable in one place, through our internet savings account.

Bob and his team will continue to evolve as we get more ideas and feedback, feel free to join him on that journey.

So saving may be traditional and sensible, but at Saffron we also think it is pretty cool! I think the current recession has taught the UK something about the buy today pay tomorrow culture and maybe, just maybe, we will get back to some of those sensible habits and with Bob to help, maybe we can have some fun doing it too.

To see Bob, visit www.moneytree.saffronbs.co.uk/savingsmanager