Family financial planning is a necessity to effective manages the family whilst meeting daily needs. We live in a society where parents toil day and night in order to provide food for their families, pay bills, send their kids to college among other parental responsibilities. And believe me trying to meet up with all these responsibilities with the meager income that comes into the family can be very frustrating and depressing too. So in lieu of this, the need to practice good family financial planning has never been overemphasized in order to able to effectively balance this meager income with the ever increasing family demands.
The first step you have to take in your family financial planning is gathering the receipt for every transaction you made for the entire month. Go through them and prioritize each of them. Doing this will enable you identify the areas you wasted money on. Your next step should be trying to cut back expenses on those areas and focus more on the necessary ones. Then try to save up the money you cut out from those areas. Adopting this practical Family financial planning step will greatly enhance your chances of saving more for your unexpected family needs.
Let’s look at these important 3 tips for a balance and coordinated family finance:
Have a better understanding of Money:
Families always experience financial difficulties if both parents hold conflicting perspective of the impact of money on the family. This can happen in a situation where one party sees money as something that should be lavished after all it’s the result of the family’s hard work, while the other thinks money is suppose to be a means to achieve the family’s necessities and also act as a guard against emergencies. When these conflicting perspectives abound, there are bound to be financial problems. The reason is not farfetched – one is prudent the other is extravagant. So parents need to be in tandem with each other in regards to money.
Highlight your Future Financial Goals:
You should be able to sit down together and draw up what their future financial goals are. What is it that you want to achieve? When do you want to achieve it? What are your plans towards achieving it? These are the questions you need to address.
Teach your Partner how to Save:
You might have been lucky to come from a family that has a good money saving culture and you realize that your partner is the exact opposite of you when it comes to saving. Then it is your duty to help him/her imbibe that money saving habit. Remember in TIP 3 we talked about setting future financial goals. So if your spouse doesn’t have a money saving habit, the is no way that you will ever get to achieve all that you have set out to achieve together.
In conclusion, with the current economic situation every family requires a good financial planning to survive.