Family Finance Planning

*Collaborative Post

Planning your finances when a family isn’t involved is hard but managing your finances when you have a little family to run after just makes things that little bit tougher, and it’s something that many families seem to struggle with. Nearly every family is in some form of debt, for one reason or another. Whilst this isn’t an ideal situation to be in, it isn’t actually too hard to get out of when you start family finance planning in an orderly way. Here are just a few ways that you can get yourself out of a tricky situation with debt.

 

Strict Planning

If you thought you had to be strict when planning your money without a family, you don’t realise how hard planning your money with a family truly is. But for some reason, a lot of people don’t even bother to do this, which could be one of the reasons why so many families are in debt. So, just before the start of every month, right before your paycheck comes in, figure out your finances. Plan for everything, and start with the biggest expenses first. So household bills, car insurance, fuel, food shopping etc. That’s just the things that a normal person would have to finance in, now think about the kids. So, you want money aside to be able to take them out nearly every weekend to enrich their life, any new clothes, toys, essentials etc. Then you want to plan in any emergencies. So, it could be a school trip, new kit for any sports clubs, home emergencies. You might factor in this and think, ‘where is all the spare money’. If you plan hard enough, you will still have money left over to give you a little treat.

 

Enjoying Family Extras

So, you can’t do all of that strict planning without giving yourself time to enjoy life. The first thing you need to think about is a nice family holiday. These are possibly the most expensive thing to afford, so you could look at saving or taking out a small loan. As long as you know you’re going to be able to pay it back, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of careful lending to get you through the months. But you should only really loan money for big things like that. If you’re loaning money to help pay the bills, then something needs to be done about your finances.

 

Family Setbacks

There’s always going to be family setbacks, some of which we’ve discussed, like something going wrong in the home. As long as you’ve been putting money aside all of the time, it shouldn’t be hard to manage something like this. If you haven’t, then just limit yourselves on the things you do, and what you buy, and get the issue fixed so you can return to normal life. So many people struggle as they continue on with their usual spending.

 

*This is a collaborative post. For further information please refer to my disclosure page.