Printable Savings Goal Tracker — Free, No Email Required
Enter the goal and the weekly amount and this works out how many boxes there are, prints the running balance on every one, and tells you the date the goal is reached. Every other printable savings chart leaves all three of those to you. It prints straight from your browser — no form, no download, no email.
Savings Tracker
- $5
- $10
- $15
- $20 14 Oct
- $25
- $30
- $35
- $40 11 Nov
- $45
- $50
- $55
- $60 9 Dec
- $65
- $70
- $75
- $80 6 Jan
- $85
- $90
- $95
- $100 3 Feb
Colour a box in each time you save. Tracker from bankofdad.io/tools/savings-tracker-generator
How long it takes to save, by goal and weekly amount
Every number below is the plain division, rounded up:
weeks = goal ÷ the amount saved each week, rounded up
Rounded up rather than to the nearest, because a child does not reach a goal on a fraction of a deposit. $50 at $20 a week is 2.5 deposits, which is three weeks.
| Goal | $1/week | $2/week | $5/week | $10/week | $20/week |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $20 | 20 | 10 | 4 | 2 | 1 |
| $50 | 50 | 25 | 10 | 5 | 3 |
| $100 | 100 | 50 | 20 | 10 | 5 |
| $150 | 150 | 75 | 30 | 15 | 8 |
| $200 | 200 | 100 | 40 | 20 | 10 |
| $300 | 300 | 150 | 60 | 30 | 15 |
| $500 | 500 | 250 | 100 | 50 | 25 |
What the interest actually changes
If you run a family bank and pay interest on your child's balance, the goal arrives sooner. How much sooner is the interesting part, and it is not what most parents expect.
The table below is $5 a week from a $0 start, with and without interest at 1% a week — the rate the compound interest calculator suggests for ages 8 to 11. Interest is added to the balance at the end of each week.
| Goal | Weeks, no interest | Weeks at 1% a week | Weeks saved |
|---|---|---|---|
| $20 | 4 | 4 | 0 |
| $50 | 10 | 10 | 0 |
| $100 | 20 | 19 | 1 |
| $150 | 30 | 27 | 3 |
| $200 | 40 | 34 | 6 |
| $300 | 60 | 48 | 12 |
| $500 | 100 | 70 | 30 |
Below about $100 the interest changes nothing. A $20 goal and a $50 goal take exactly as long either way, and $100 comes in one week early. The effect only becomes visible once the wait is long enough for compounding to have something to work on: at $300 it saves twelve weeks, and at $500 it cuts the wait from 100 weeks to 70.
That is worth knowing before you set up a family bank to make a short goal arrive faster. It will not. What it does is make a long goal survivable, and give a child something to watch in the weeks when the balance is otherwise just going up by the same amount over and over.
One thing this is not: a savings account rate. The FDIC's national rate for savings accounts was 0.38% a year, effective 20 July 2026 — per year, not per week. A family-bank rate is a teaching device paid out of your own pocket on a timescale a child can notice, and it is deliberately unrealistic. Worth knowing what you are committing to: 1% a week compounds to 67.77% a year, and 2% a week to 180.03%. The compound interest calculator shows what any rate costs you before you set it.
Does a tracker on the fridge actually work?
There is real evidence on this, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not cover.
Harkin and colleagues published a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin in 2016 asking whether monitoring progress toward a goal makes reaching it more likely. Their literature search "identified 138 studies (N = 19,951) that randomly allocated participants to an intervention designed to promote monitoring of goal progress versus a control condition." Pooling them, they found that interventions "promoted goal attainment (d+ = 0.40, 95% CI: 0.32 to 0.48)."
A d of 0.40 is a moderate effect, not a transformation. But the moderator is the part that matters here: "progress monitoring had larger effects on goal attainment when the outcomes were reported or made public, and when the information was physically recorded."
Physically recorded. A sheet on the fridge, coloured in by hand and visible to the household, is precisely the condition the effect was strongest under — which is the honest argument for paper over an app, and it is an argument nobody else on this topic bothers to make.
What this evidence is not. Those 138 experiments are about goal progress monitoring in general, predominantly health and behaviour-change goals. None of it is about children, and none of it is about saving money. It supports the claim that physically recording progress toward a goal helps people reach goals. It does not support the claim that savings charts help children save, and this page will not make that claim on its behalf. If you have seen a printable savings chart cite research, check what the research was actually about.
How the sheet is built
The generator walks the schedule one week at a time. Each week it adds the deposit, prints the new balance on a box, and — if the family-bank rate is on — applies interest to the balance before the next week. That is why the first box is exactly the weekly amount whether or not interest is switched on: the money has not sat anywhere yet.
Above 104 boxes — two years of weekly deposits — the sheet switches to one box per four weeks and says so on the printout. A tracker that runs to twelve pages is a bug, not a thorough tracker. Past ten years it refuses to build a sheet at all.
Dates print under every fourth box and under the last one, and the finish date prints once at the top. If the deposit slips a week, the dates are wrong by a week and the balances are still right — which is the way round you want it.
Sources
- Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., & Sheeran, P. (2016). "Does Monitoring Goal Progress Promote Goal Attainment? A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence." Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229. doi:10.1037/bul0000025. Quoted from the accepted manuscript record at White Rose Research Online. Checked 10 August 2026.
- National rate for savings accounts, 0.38%, effective 20 July 2026 — FDIC, National Rates and Rate Caps. The FDIC defines the national rate as "the average of rates paid by all insured depository institutions and credit unions for which data is available, with rates weighted by each institution's share of domestic deposits." Checked 10 August 2026.
Related
The savings goal calculator is the interactive version of the first table, with your own numbers and no printing. The compound interest calculator models the family-bank rate over longer horizons, and explaining compound interest to a kid covers why the balance grows faster than the deposits do. For where the weekly deposit comes from in the first place, the printable chore chart is the other half of the fridge, and running a bank of mom and dad covers the ledger behind both. All the free calculators are here.
Frequently asked questions
How long will it take my child to save $100?
At $5 a week, 20 weeks — just under five months. At $1 a week it is 100 weeks, at $2 a week 50, at $10 a week 10 and at $20 a week 5. If you pay 1% a week interest on the balance, the $5-a-week case comes in at 19 weeks instead of 20, which is the entire benefit at that size of goal. The table above has every combination, and the generator will do your exact numbers and print the dates.
Does a savings chart on the fridge actually help?
The closest real evidence is a 2016 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin by Harkin and colleagues, covering "138 studies (N = 19,951)" of goal progress monitoring. Monitoring "promoted goal attainment (d+ = 0.40, 95% CI: 0.32 to 0.48)" — a moderate effect — and the effect was larger "when the information was physically recorded", which is an argument for a paper sheet specifically. Be clear about the limits: those studies are about goal monitoring in general, mostly health and behaviour change. None of them are about children and none of them are about money. It is evidence that recording progress helps people reach goals, not evidence that savings charts help children save.
Should I pay interest on my child's savings?
That is your call, and here is the number that should inform it: below about $100 it makes no difference to the finish date. A $20 or $50 goal takes exactly as long with 1% weekly interest as without. At $300 it saves twelve weeks and at $500 it saves thirty, so the case for interest is about long goals and about giving a child something to watch, not about arriving sooner at a small one. Note that a weekly percentage is much larger than it looks — 1% a week is 67.77% a year, against an FDIC national savings rate of 0.38% a year as of 20 July 2026. The compound interest calculator shows what any rate costs you before you commit to it.
Do I need to give my email to download it?
No. There is no form, no download and no account. The sheet renders on this page and the print button hands it to your browser, so Print → Save as PDF gives you a file if you want one and paper if you don't.