Intro
I know from my own experience how easy it is to neglect to manage money between all the other things we do these days, from picking up kids from school, to meeting work deadlines, to tackling endless chores around the home.
I have discovered some practical and easy methods to keep track of our family money, which don’t require as much time as I don’t have. I would like to tell you in this article what has really helped us out.
The Money Management Struggle for Time-Poor Busy Families
I believe it’s important to note why financial management might be a challenge as soon as kids, jobs and household responsibilities come into the equation before embarking on specific strategies.
It was so much easier to keep track of money when I was single.
Whether it’s a financial decision or not, there’s more to consider: childcare, school, more mouths to feed, unpredictable medical expenses, and sometimes both sets of spending habits and incomes to coordinate.
Then there’s the basic problem of time scarceness.
When it’s time to sit down to look over a budget or plan expenses, it’s time to relax, focus and take a close look time that’s often hard to find during the typical busy family night spent helping kids with their homework, preparing dinner, and getting them to sleep.
I learned that the typical financial advice given in many books and seminars did not fit my lifestyle but required an hour or two of unbroken time each week.
Not to mention, family finances can be more complex than a single person’s finances, due to emotional factors. Relationship spending, preferences on what to pay for first for the children and conflicting spending patterns and attitudes can complicate the simple budgeting advice given by most sources.
Understanding and knowing about these particular struggles helped me realize that I would never be as good as I thought I should be at something that in reality is not easy, it is hard and that is okay, I feel free to admit this.
As a Family, Getting on the Same Page
I don’t think one of the best things I ever changed was to make money management a family affair, not me handling it all up here and hoping for the best.
This involved deliberate communication and resulted in stress reduction with quality decision making.
I began to set up a short regular review meeting with my partner to look at upcoming costs, run through any financial worries, and to make sure I was on the same page as my partner in terms of priorities.
What worked for us was to have short discussions that we kept repeating over a period of time and didn’t have long discussions occasionally.
There were also some common financial priorities that we agreed to pursue early on, such as, creating a smaller emergency savings account, saving for certain family specific items and limiting any new debt being accumulated for unnecessary items.
We had a clear list of our priorities and would not have to renegotiate them each time a spending decision was required we would just simply know back to our list.
We also have our children participate in age-appropriate conversations about money, which has helped. Even simple conversations such as “Why are we going with that particular grocer” or “Why aren’t we buying something now, we’ll wait for the family holiday” has actually helped create a financial awareness in our family, as well as reinforcing our own family’s financial values.
Making Your Budgeting System Easy
Soon I discovered that any system for budgeting that was time and spreadsheet-heavy would not withstand the impact of real family life! Making it easy was a key to consistency.
Instead of dozens of some categories, we determined it sensible to use a few core categories, things like housing, food, transportation, kid’s care, saving and a small Flexible Spending category rather than keeping up to date with all the sub categories.
This streamlined system significantly reduced maintenance effort and provided us a good overall view of our finances.
One of the most significant adaptations we had was being able to automate as much as possible.
Constant manual inputting was impractical when our life each week was consumed with too few moments to do so, so with automatic transfers into savings, automatic bill payments and automatic categorisation in our banking app, we no longer have to do them ourselves.
We also appreciated financial tools that would make it easier to organize and communicate finances instead of having a bunch of random notes or relying solely on memory.
Whether it’s a shared program to keep a budget of your expenses or a larger group, household organizing platform, such as the one found at gohighlevel, a centralized solution can make all the difference for busy families who must juggle multiple schedules and financial duties, and keep everyone in the loop without having to store all the information manually.
Essential Budget Accounts for Hectic Families
In case you’re creating a simplified framework of your own, the following are the essential categories I would suggest first starting with:
Housing and utilities: Such as rent/mortgage, electric, water, etc. and internet.
Groceries and household goods: Apart from eating out and for convenience shopping.
Transportation: Including the cost of gas, insurance costs, vehicle maintenance.
Childcare and education: Costs that are related to childcare and education, such as school supplies, activity fees, etc.
Contributions to savings: Savings and emergency fund, preferably set up auto-draft as soon as each paycheck is received.
Flexible Spending: A small category of spending for family activities, little treats or an unplanned purchase.
Just a handful of categories and not dozens of tiny ones helped us with our budget and consistently sticking with it even in the hectic weeks.
Plan Healthy Meals as a Financial Strategy
One of the categories in most families’ budgets that rises or falls with their discretion is grocery expenditures, and when I made this a focus of my budget, it changed more than any other one thing we did in our finances.
I began using each week’s available sale items to plan meals, which help cut down on the food budget instead of planning meals and shopping for them no matter how expensive they were.
This little change on our approach cut our grocery bill noticeably, but we didn’t have to sacrifice our family’s meals for variety or nutrition.
Trying to batch cook on the weekend was another helpful practice.
That meant that we reduced our food waste and did not have to rely on our gravely sometimes take-out when things got hectic on an evening during the week.
This approach also saved a significant amount of time throughout the week, which was an important factor in reducing our feeling of having too much to do, as well as the dollars saved!
Having children plan meals and how to get them involved in the supermarket provided a surprising bonus as well.
How to Control Childcare and Activity Fees
Child care and activity expenses were among our highest and least flexible, so strategically planning for these expenses made a world of difference in our finances.
The first step was the careful look at all of the extracurricular activities available to our children and which were most interesting and covered our family values, versus out of guilt or comparison.
This is a deliberate strategy which resulted in a significant decrease in unessential spending and an increase in supporting our children’s real interest and growth.
Looking into community and school based resources revealed community center activities, free of cost or low cost, and/or sliding-scale child care, which provided similar benefits to more expensive alternative services we had not previously thought of.
It occurred to me that there are a lot of resources that exist in our area of which I was unaware until I did the research to find them.
Taking turns and phones to take children from reciprocal families to activities, coordinating their care schedules, or occasionally swapping babysitting responsibilities, also saved both expenses and trouble.
This type of informal support network was not something that we just were able to do, but building it has been worthwhile in financial terms and also with regard to the pressure we have on the scheduling.
Creating a Family Emergency Fund
Unexpected things happen all the time, and it’s particularly hard on families when medical bills or car repairs or some appliance breaks down and we just had a very small emergency fund, or didn’t have a large emergency fund at all.
Our initial goal was to get in line with a realistic, rather than the six months of savings recommended by other financial advice that just did not seem feasible at first.
We tackled the smaller goal which was easier to achieve and gave us a sense of confidence and continued momentum to increase our savings further down the road.
We were able to build up our emergency fund because we decided to have a regular, small payment made into a separate account and not have to make any monthly determination to save.
We found it not difficult to do without as we could well afford it in our normal budget.
With this buffer in place, I feel like we’ve approached financial surprises as a family in a different way. .
Educating Kids About Money The Easy Way
I believe that a product strategy of having our youngsters engage in age-appropriate conversations about money has improved our overall family financial skills and strategies, not just our children’s!
We would share what we chose to do out loud and this would clarify to me my own thinking and intention in my spending.
We began to give our children little sums of money to manage for themselves as an allowance or for doing little bits/ bits of chores and we gave them simple guidance on saving, spending and giving.
It was fun for them to make their own minor decisions about how their money was spent, including the occasional wrong ones – it was also very instructive for me and it was also a good way for us to have a good discussion about our other family finances.
When we make a significant family financial choice – we also take care to explain to our children why we are saving for something, why it is important to save for that, or why we chose to forgo a costlier item to save.
This isn’t making the money subject a taboo, or something that we’re not allowed to talk about openly in our household, it’s helping to normalize the money conversation.
Money Lessons Made Easy for Busy Families
A few simple ideas of how we’ve incorporated financial education into our everyday family life:
Consider giving an age-appropriate allowance of funny money related to age appropriate responsibilities and give it consistently.
Get children to take part in budget planning when shopping for food, compare shopping prices or stay on the shopping list.
Discuss the reasoning behind financial choices, making that simple, in relationship to family goals or values.
Provide a system of savings, spending, and giving gifts of any money given to children, developing a balanced approach to money from an early age.
Let children participate in activities that teach them about delayed gratification, including helping to plan for the family such as saving for a vacation.
Sure these practices are small and good practice for our kids, but they’ve helped us to practice better money habits as a family.
Reducing Financial Stress via Improved Systems
Justin and Nicole Eldridge are working together to alleviate financial stress via improved systems. In addition to the practical budgeting strategies, I have discovered that decreasing the “mental load” of family financial management has been essential as well as the numbers themselves.
Even if you are actually able to track and manage the money, it can be an exhausting activity to think about and worry about your finances constantly.
We used to send a lot of information back and forth and have to call each other just to find out what’s going on and what the balances on the accounts are and how much is we need to save or how much is due and etc and just to get the information on how much is in the accounts and what needs to be paid.
This means, if both say good-bye to the temptation to hide purchases, it reduces the psychological burden of one partner having to manage all the money.
When this was all worked up we allowed a small regular amount of “miscellaneous” spending within our budget, just so that every little expense wouldn’t be considered a failure in a budget.
This kind of buffer was crucial for us as a busy family, a forgotten fundraiser at school, a last-minute birthday present or any other small, random expense wouldn’t otherwise put a dent in our overall financial plans or cause unnecessary stress.
Summary
Money management for the busy family does not revolve around a complicated spreadsheet or hours of in-a-row planning sessions, but simple, realistic money-management systems that fit into the busy lives of a family.
Here’s what that’s been for us: open discussion, automatic savings, planning our meals and then, age appropriate, putting our children to work with money as part of that plan.
None of these have gotten rid of our financial stress, but combined, they’ve made our money feel like it is more manageable and far less overwhelming even during the busiest seasons of our family.
