Effective Strategies to Help Set Up a Better Family Budget

• The first significant step is to change your thinking about money, shift your attitude toward spending, actually focus on saving money, planning ahead and driving for success
   
• Develop a greater awareness of how you earn, manage, save and spend money
   
• Awareness of how others would lure, entice and want you to spend your money (advertisers, retailers,  and manufacturers)
   
• To stop participating and playing the “Keeping-up-with-the-Jones’s game,” living with a false sense of wealth and security, while over-extending your self and financial resources, beyond your means. Do not envy others and lust after  things that they might have or even worse, get deeper into debt to compete or keep up appearances. It is counterproductive and can ruin lives!
   
• Delay purchases – learn and do, sometimes without having to buy!
   
• Set solid financial and budget goals for yourself and your family that you can work on individually and collectively to achieve together
   
• Set spending limits and stick to them
   
• Do not make ends meet utilizing credit cards, stay away from ATM machines, cash, cash advances, do not cheat on your budget
   
• Understand your income – know where the money is coming from and how it varies throughout a one-year cycle
   
• Understand your expenses – monthly and irregular, unexpected expenses
   
• Set a few realistic financial goals
   
• Know your own habits, spending, temptation, and where the areas of risk and exposure are.
   
• Set up savings and spending mechanisms that work, reserve and growth accounts and have the right number of credit cards
   
• Make an income plan – detail is important
   
• Plan your obligations and must pays – smooth out large size bills with reserve accounts
   
• Plan your necessities and look for ways to economize
   
• Set aside pocket money for daily incidentals
   
• Create a family allowance to cover entertainment
   
• Create a personal allowance
• Balance and consolidate, wise decisions and trade-offs – agree and stick to it
   
• Live happily on a budget
   
• Welcome to frugal living mode! Cutting back on living expenses – alternatives for simple living
   
• re-examine why you work and how you live
   
• stop tossing your hard-earned cash away
   
• shopping, overwork, stress and debt (some refer to this as an illness quipped: ‘Affluenza’!)
   
• celebrate when you have money left over at the end of the month – indulge a little and reward yourself – rewarding patience and persistence! Not just the doing good and sticking with it

‘How to set up a Family budget’, is advocating a new code of fiscal honor for our families, so to speak. It proposes family budgets, that ask for wisdom (best choices and decisions), discipline (sticking to it), honesty (no cheating), persistence and celebration when we do it right!

Next article: Understanding the Rationale and Process of Budgeting

Go to: Family Budgeting: Main Table of Contents