10 Ways To Save Family Budget

We often use the expression “make it till payday”. In other words, to allocate available funds for a certain period, without resorting to the services of friends, relatives or credit services. Some people are used to this task a few days before the money arrives on their card, others face the problem only in emergencies. Either way, it’s no fun, you’ll agree.

It is especially unpleasant to realize the lack of money when it comes to the family – how to explain to a child that today his mother will not buy a chocolate bar, but in a week … The thought of a bicycle promised to his son in the spring, leads to confusion, and any conversation with friends about holiday plans causes just panic fear that someone close to him will think of spending a few weeks at the sea instead of “ideal for vacation” grandmother’s cottage. Why, with the same level of income, does one family not experience financial difficulties and spend their free time with pleasure, while others are literally making ends meet? Let’s take a peek at some successful home financiers and find out what the secret is.

10 significant points of the family economy

Remember the motto of the Soviet financial system “the economy must be economical”? You can mock the history of that period, but it works in any economic system, and not only within a country. So, which expenditure items can be optimized, using the contemporary language?

1. Entertainment

How do we spend our free time? What do we do as a family? Sad to say, the favorite place to spend a weekend with the family is the shopping and entertainment center. The word ‘entertainment’ certainly appears in the name of these places, but the main thing is still the shopping mall. They sell everything from movie tickets, snacks, ice cream, toys, shoes, clothes, and a host of other non-essential items. Children at the arcade, mum in the fitting room, dad in the food court; in the evening we return home laden with spontaneous purchases, dusty, full of fast food, having spent a decent amount of honestly earned money.

Maybe you should try to go out of town, to the park, go sledging, skiing, skating in winter, have a picnic in nature at any time of the year, go for a walk in the woods, pick berries and mushrooms in the fall? Objections that you have nothing to drive to and no equipment are just cheap excuses. Public transport will deliver to any suburb, and any equipment can be rented – it is not free, but the next jumper (a hundred first in the wardrobe) is not worth less.

2. Shopping

“How many times have we been told…” that purchases, from the smallest to the largest, should be planned, but we still go to the shop every day, come back with bags full of necessary and not so necessary, and even completely unnecessary, periodically we take out full bags of unusable and go to the shop again. Without a list. You can go on from here, as in the famous song about a pop and a dog.

Get a handy folding shopper bag, it’s much more durable and practical and eco-friendly than shopping bags, even if they are ‘biodegradable’. It will pay for itself in a month and last for several years.

Start a notebook or create a note on your phone where you write down all your planned purchases, check against the list and mercilessly empty your basket of anything not listed, despite the super-low prices. This is for starters, until you run out of endless supplies of tea, macaroni, socks, kitchen towels, cute cups, jars of olives that only Mum eats, washing powders and your daughter’s once favorite biscuits. Then the list gets longer and you can put off some purchases until the price comes down. This is called savings, when you choose a good time to buy what you need, rather than picking up all the promotional items from the shelves of shops.

Such an approach should be applied both to regular purchases and to one-off major purchases. A separate story about children’s goods.

3. Shopping for children

Anyone who is more or less observant at least once in their life has noticed that children grow up. Fast. They don’t even have time to try on all the bought onesies and stuffed onesies once and then they grow out of them. If only the onesies, but the jackets, boots and other elements of the baby’s wardrobe – the cost of all of this is quite inhumane. Our grandmothers and mothers practiced sharing baby clothes, passing them from one child to another as they grew up. A very good tradition, especially since the modern level of communication has made it possible to create many online resources for sale, exchange and donation.

Prams, children’s car seats and other self-propelled and auxiliary means of transport don’t have to be bought at all, or, more precisely, don’t need to be. There are rentals for temporary use. You can rent practically anything for a day, a few days or a few months.

4.  Food

Yes, you can’t save money on food, even my grandmother used to say that. But my grandmother did not know about fast food and sushi. She baked pies, cooked delicious soup, and made preserves. Maybe that’s why she never asked for money in debt, and even from her modest pension, she always saved for gifts for her grandchildren.

How to ensure a healthy diet and save money?

Make it a habit to cook porridge for breakfast or at least scrambled eggs. Cooked sausage (some meat waste and chemical additives for flavor, color and smell) is not cheaper than meat, and baked homemade delicatessen is also much more filling. It doesn’t take long to prepare, but the benefits are obvious and the savings are considerable.

Seasonal berries can be bought and frozen. Even if you don’t want to bother with jams, compotes and other stuff, you can always have a natural morsel at home. You can also indulge in smoothies at home – everyone makes a recipe to his or her own taste.

Homemade food surpasses any business lunch in terms of taste and benefits. Don’t be lazy to take your lunchbox from home to work. Dumplings and dumplings can also be made on their own – a great excuse to spend time with your family doing something healthy and fun.

A container of sandwiches, a thermos cup with your favorite tea or coffee and a bottle of water – any trip should be a healthy snack or even a picnic.

5. Holidays

Taking a family trip doesn’t come cheap. Plan at least six months in advance, pick your dates and try to buy your tickets in advance before the price goes up. It is not necessary to choose luxury hotels for a beach holiday. Often a family holiday in such places is reduced to children spending their days in the pool with the animators and parents by the other pool at the bar. Choose a hotel or apartment close to the beach and enjoy the sea, sun and air.

You can go on holiday by car. In that case, it is advisable to plan a route so that one of the parents doesn’t have to spend the whole day behind the wheel, visiting places of interest, stopping to rest at bodies of water to swim, take a walk in the woods or even go cycling. To make the trip comfortable, you can rent a roof box to carry everything you need. You don’t need to buy a tent either; rental services provide a variety of outdoor equipment.

6. Health

You can’t buy it, as the saying goes. It’s true. You can keep it, because prevention is cheaper than cure. Don’t neglect free preventive check-ups, try to spend more time in the fresh air, eat right and regularly – a lot of diseases can be avoided in that simple way.

No one is safe from trouble or illness, and then the doctor prescribes a long list of medicines. Many expensive medicines, not all of them of course, have more budget-friendly analogues. Commercials around the clock talk about miracle pills, but do not rush to run behind them at the pharmacy. Instant cures for colds contain the usual paracetamol and many additives, which cause side effects.

Do not abuse vitamins and food supplements – in a normal diet, most of the necessary vitamins and micronutrients we get from food, some are produced by the body itself.

Exercise. A membership to a fitness center does not usually pay for itself if you are not used to regular exercise. There are free sports clubs for children.

7. Big purchases

Furniture, appliances, a car and other expensive purchases should be planned. Choose the model that best suits your needs and don’t be tempted by tempting offers. There are plenty of ways to compare and contrast products in online shops without having to have a consultant whose job is to keep customers coming back for more.

Carefully compare the features of new models with the past ones – the differences are usually negligible and the price of cars and appliances from last year’s release is dropping significantly during the president’s New Year’s greetings. Wait for the seasonal sale and get the right thing at a good price.

Don’t get carried away with multifunctional devices. For instance, a food processor is mostly just used as a mixer and there are lots of examples, so buy only the appliance you need.

8. Utility bills

Take a closer look at how much your monthly payments add up to. You might have a lot of options for your phone or cable TV that you don’t use when you have normal internet service, so why pay for them?

Introducing meters, replacing light bulbs with energy saving ones, switching off unnecessary services and subscriptions will keep a small, but not excessive amount of money in the family budget every month.

9. Transport

A monthly pass is always cheaper than a single ticket, and in case of transportation it’s an undeniable fact. Pass for a certain number of trips or monthly – depending on the intensity of your trips, choose the one that will pay for itself.

How much does it cost to drive a car every day, including petrol and parking fees? The decision to give up a personal car is pretty radical, but many are already taking it, especially if there is no need to take the children to the kindergarten or school, which are close to home. For one-off trips, you can use carsharing, and sometimes a taxi is cheaper than taking public transport for three or four people.

10. Savings

You might wonder how you can save when it comes to saving money. If you save at least a minimum amount every month, make sure you get a top-up deposit, even if it’s very low-interest. This way you can better understand how much more efficient your savings skills become and plan for quite large purchases. Avoid shopping on credit – it’s much more expensive than the amount shown on the price tag.

A family budget is not just about the income and expenses of people who live together temporarily and may end the relationship at any time, it is an important part of life for people who once made a conscious decision to be together, to have and raise children and to make plans for the future. To implement any plan, it is necessary to calculate resources correctly, so let’s start by learning to count and spend money carefully.

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Author: Cheryl Gorman

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Saving Money

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