Make Budgeting A Joint Venture Family Affair

Setting up your financial budget as a joint venture for the whole family can be a fulfilling and satisfying experience. If you haven’t had success with managing your finances in the past, then setting up a budget will put your economic situation into perspective and serve several purposes all at once, helping you to make cuts in the spending habits that went un-noticed previously. Getting your specified budget down on paper can be boring at first – but once you master the art, you may find that you’ll enjoy the challenge and rewards of sticking to your budget.

Engage your immediate family – spouse and children into the budget project. If you are single then perhaps you’d like to involve your Mom, Dad or a trusted friend – this is to engage you with 100% of your attention on the project as it can be easy to laps back into old habits when doing this kind of thing on your own. With your spouse and children, make your financial budget project into a joint venture, with everyone participating.

Be open and honest about the family’s financial dilemma and discuss your expectations, goals and visions for the near and distant future. If your children are old enough to understand the concept of money, they can be of great constructive help and will also learn from this exercise. When each family member is involved in the budget project – particularly teens, it saves a great deal of energy when having to make excuses to them of why they can’t buy this or have that. Informing them of what’s going on will help to avoid future arguments and any counterproductive actions on their part that could end up making the situation worse.

A great exercise to start of your financial budget project is to ask each member of the family to make a list of ten relevant points (for example) regarding their financial needs, expectations, goals and visions. Add a second part to that list that shows their usual expenses. When everyone is finished with his or her individual list – discuss each point of each list together. Identify which items that are normally purchased during the course of the month – that can be eliminated without hardship, in order to save extra money from the monthly income. By doing this together, your family is participating and can see their contributions will help to make the family finances better.

During the family discussion take notes – this is an important discussion and your notes will help to develop your joint family budget. It’s important that family members collectively do their part in both understanding the financial situation your family is experiencing as well as understanding that the family as a whole is better equipped to find the solution when working together in the same direction.

By involving children into what is generally an adult task and conversation topic, they will soon learn the value of money and want to contribute positively in the family joint venture. If your children receive pocket money or income from an after-school job, encourage them to make their own budget to manage their money and too stick to it. This can prove invaluable to them later on in life.

To start the family financial budget – as well as the lists mentioned - you’ll need:

1. Your chequebook, credit card statements or other records of expenses.

2. Make columns for each topic as you come across it. More will occur to you as you work. If you have a spreadsheet program on your computer, this will help you a great deal

3. List each purchase under the relevant column only using amounts i.e. for Groceries, eating out, movies, mortgage/rent, insurance, car, vacation, clothes etc.

4. Add each column together

5. Add each column total together

6. Write in income amount

7. Subtract expenses from income

If your outgoing expenses are more than your income, begin cutting back on non-essentials. Even if you don’t save frequently, make a column for savings, once you get the hang of it, this column will soon begin filling up. Your budget is so important to building a solid foundation to your family’s financial wellness.

Naturally, if you have a spreadsheet program on your computer it’s a little faster to set this up. If you don’t have suitable software, you can download a full office suite at no charge at openoffice.org .

Prioritize your spending to the essentials and encourage your family members to do the same. Put a limitation on the amount you and family members spend daily. When you go shopping, make a shopping list and calculate roughly the amount you need to take with you to purchase the items on your list. Don’t take your credit cards with you. Give yourself some time to get used to this, don’t give up, but do get used to spending less.

If you take care of the pennies, the dollars will take care of themselves.