What is important to you and your family? Love? Food? Safety? Happiness? It could be all these things, or something else entirely, every single family is different. But there is something else that is seriously important to live in a family. If we lived in a Utopia, we could try our best to avoid the impact and strength of money, but unfortunately, the truth is that money really does make the world go around. That’s true for our family, if we want to achieve anything, we are going to need some kind of cash to act as a foundation. If your daughter wants to go to college, she’ll need cash. If your son wants to travel the world, he’ll need cash. You’ll need money to do a lot in your family, from putting a roof over the head of your loved ones to protect them from the outside world, to ensure they have clean clothes and full bellies. Unless you’re super-duper sustainable and live in a way where you can make your own clothes and grow your own food, money is going to be a hugely important thing for your family. Like a faucet, money controls a lot of things in our family, and without money, that faucet is turned to close, and no more opportunities are released from it. Money is the launching platform for a lot in life – and not just that, but it helps keep our family safe and fed.
Maybe money shouldn’t be this important, but it is and that’s unavoidable right now. We can certainly ensure our happiness doesn’t surround the size of our bank account, but we can’t ignore money and the security it brings to our family. If you want to be the type of parent that puts the family first, before everything else – you are going to need to understand the impact that money and finances have on your family and ensure that you put the physical safety of your family first.
However, the modern family has a lot of difficulties in terms of cash. There is always something to pay for, and it’s nearly always unaffordable for the average family. Thankfully, we have a lot of options and ways to make ends meet. We could go about finding payday loan shops, signing up to credit cards or payment plans. What’s important to note is that we have the means to ensure we can get through the month financially unscathed. It’s unavoidable though – as many families will live from paycheck to paycheck. It’s just a sign of the times and might highlight that something is going wrong with the family budget. If you’re relying on the plastic of credit cards to get through the month, or you keep taking out loans because the money is running dry sometime around the 17th of the month – it will point accusing fingers towards your budget. If this sounds like a familiar situation, you’ll need to take a long hard look at your cash and where it’s going. Paying close attention to your spending habits might ensure that you save some cash by default – almost by accident. If you are stuck in a situation where your cash is being stretched to the limit each and every single month, it’s clear that all is not well with the budget – as we’ve said. If this is you, it’s time to start paying attention to what you are buying.
You can stand to save a lot by being vigilant with your outgoing finances. If you want to get serious, save your receipts and input this into a chart. The raw data never lies, and if you can see where you are leaking money, it will help you take action and help you control it. You might notice that you’re spending a lot on your cable bills – why not consider using Netflix and Amazon Prime – it could be cheaper? You might see that your grocery shopping is expensive out of control and this is a good point to wind in that spend. Buy cheaper food, buy in bulk and try to shop around for deals. Your family doesn’t need to suffer at all because you are being better with your cash!
In fact, being better with your cash might mean that you have more cash. Money that can be put away towards the future of your family, money that can actually do something instead of being wasted. Take a close eye to your spending and see if you can cut it down to put your family first.
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