Know that doing your regular 9 to 5 isn’t the only way you can contribute to your family budget. Optimizing our daily or monthly spending and knowing how to do that can go a long way when it comes to the amount of money you are putting on the side.
There are really countless ways on how you can save a little bit extra for your family. If money management is not something you consider yourself good at - don’t worry, as there are some neat tricks that everyone can resort to in order to strengthen the looks of the budget.
Today we are going to point your towards our favourite budgeting tips and some things everyone can do that will ultimately positively reflect on the amount of money you are left with at the end of the month. So, here we go…
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Budgeting Tips - Handling Debt
If your family has entered a debt spiral as well and you’re struggling to keep up with monthly installments you are constantly paying to the bank, this is the pain point you’ll be most likely best addressing in order to improve your finances.
So let's look at you can manage the big debts
If you’ve taken several different loans throughout the years and now you’re paying them back all at once, you might want to consider consolidating a loan.
Then again, there is another way of battling this. If by chance one loan carries significantly higher interest rate than the others, you will definitely want to pay off that particular debt first. You don’t want to throw away your money on high-interest rates every month when you can use that money to pay off other loans.
If you have a mortgage, and equity in your home, you can also look at consolidating personal loans and credit card debt into your home loan, reducing the interest you are paying on those loans by a lot. Most credit card interest rates are between 17-22% - so a whole lot more than your home loan.
Ultimately knowing where and how to save money will help a lot. Which brings us to our next point.
Budgeting Tips - Little Things Add Up
Mastering the way of organizing and prioritizing your spendings can really work well for the budget. Restraining from often impulsive purchases may seem negligible to you, but if you look at it from a different perspective, you will be surprised by the amount of money you can save by just sticking to the pre-made shopping lists. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you will need to practice military discipline and stick blindly to what you’ve written down before going to the grocery store, but you might also want to skip on buying that pack of sweets even if it’s on discount. Do you really need it?
Following up on the subject, if your kids are at school and you are giving them the money for fast food and the canteen instead of fixing them up with sandwiches taken from home, this might as well be something you’d want to address. Not to mention the money you or your husband are giving for your lunch and coffee at work.
Familiarizing yourself with tips on how to prepare food for the weeks ahead and what can or can’t you freeze can prove to be very useful here. Also, you should definitely look into ways to manage your leftovers. Repeatedly throwing food away is just not something that’ll help you bolster your family budget.
Budgeting Tips - Managing the Bills
If you are struggling to pay your quarterly bills look into 'bill smoothing' where you pay an estimated weekly/fortnightly/monthly payment so that you aren't shelling out large amounts every three months. It can be a lot more manageable for things like gas, electricity, and water.
How do you save money at home?
Our guest blogger today is Stephanie from Military Travel Mama. Stephanie is a mother of two and a military wife who lives in the south of the USA.
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