Family Finance - Happy Family and Money

As a couple, you are often faced with money management issues that can stand in your way of achieving happiness with your partner. In light of that, it is important to adopt effective strategies to manage your money as a family. This is because money can wreck a happy home. In this article, I will share some of the tips that I have found useful for the management of money by couples. The money management tips I will consider in this article are: 1. Understand Your Money Attitudes 2. Make Money Goals 3. Where and How to Keep Your Money 4. How to Share Expenses 5. Making a Budget 6. Involving Other Family Members in Managing Money 7. Protecting Your Money 8. Saving and Investing Your Money 9. Managing Your Debts 10. Knowing Your Net Worth 11. Planning Your Estate and Will Now, let’s look at these tips in detail below. What Are the Money Management Tips That Every Couple Must Use? Money management is an important part of every marriage and family. You and your partner must do well to handle your monies effectively, whether you have kids and other dependents or not. That helps protect you from living a money-stressed life with your loved ones. The following tips seek to help you understand what you must do to curb that: 1. Understand Your Money Attitudes The first thing to do as a couple is to understand the attitude of each partner towards money. Knowing the personality of your partner and how he or she treats money is critical to your management efforts. To do that, try to have a money talk together. Make it a regular and open one. Engaging in financial communication between or among you will help you track all your income and expenditure during the period under consideration. Find out whether it is appropriate to tell your partner how much you earn here. 2. Make Money Goals Another great way for managing your money is by consciously clearing your money expectations and goals for the family. By identifying your financial or money goals, you lay the foundation for all your financial planning processes. Remember, your money goals must be SMART. This means they must Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-based. Having financial goals that are SMART makes it easier for you to achieve them. You must make short, medium, and longer-term money goals. Classifying them this way helps you prioritize them according to how urgent they are. 3. Where and How to Keep Your Money Here, I want to draw your attention to the possibilities available to you when considering where and how to put your money. In cases where only one person is working (especially the husband), that person often runs the show when it comes to money. However, I believe the other party must still be part of the money management process. In cases where all the partners are working or earning, there might be a need to sit down and talk about how to manage your household income together. We all know that you have to keep your money in the bank. What we are not sure of is how it will be done. That is, should you combine your finances into one account, create a separate account, or have both combined and separate accounts? Let’s look at these in detail: A. Combined Accounts Here, you agree to combine your finances and keep them in one joint checking account. Everyone can withdraw from the account, even though on agreed terms or budget. You may ask, "What if I and my partner have different money attitudes and beliefs?" That’s most likely to be the case. If that is your case, open, transparent, and regular financial communication is key to your success. Don’t play with that. Remember, transparency is always critical when two or more people agree to work together to achieve a common goal. B. Separate Checking Accounts Normally, you choose to keep separate checking accounts that the other does not have access to. In this situation, you manage your money and budget separately while sharing responsibilities. That is, if one of you messes up with his or her money, it will not affect the other that much. In recent times, most couples tend to have separate checking accounts. Whatever the case is for you, effective money communication with your partner is necessary for tracking your income and expenditure. Analyze your situation and choose what is appropriate for you. C. Combined Accounts with Separate Accounts Here, you and your partner opt to have one combined account where you contribute some percentage of earnings to it while keeping separate accounts for yourselves. The combined account is normally used to cater to the day-to-day operation of your home. It is used to meet the expenses of your home based on a well-planned budget for the household. Aside from that, everyone has separate bank accounts where they keep the other part of their incomes and run them separately without the interference of other partners. Depending on your situation, the amount to be contributed to the combined accounts will be shared equally or according to the earnings of each. Whatever suits you, follow that. 4. How to Share Expenses This is another important factor to consider when managing the money in your home. How are you going to share your expenses or bills? Is it going to be the responsibility of one partner? Are you going to share it? If yes, how? Some couples may choose to share the expenses of the household equally (50-50). This is likely to be possible if everyone earns the same amount. This is likely to be challenging if they are earning less than the other partner. With this, some partners choose to share bills according to the amount everyone earns. This method is meant to treat everyone fairly. The less you earn, the less you pay, and the reverse is true. For the purposes of sharing bills, open a joint bank account where everyone throws his or her part of the contribution towards them. Make a budget showing how the money contributed will be used to meet the financial needs of your family. 5. Making a Budget Another important way of managing your money as a couple is by budgeting. Budgeting helps you track your income and expenditures. With the help of a budget, you can track where your money goes. That is, it prevents you from being tempted to purchase anything that catches your eye. A budget provides you with a map for meeting your goals within the limits of your means. A budget also helps you plan for times of emergency in the future. A well-considered budget includes a section where you put aside some portion of your money for future eventualities. For example, when you lose your job, illness, the death of a loved one, and divorce can put pressure on you financially. I have spoken a lot about why you should embark on budgeting. Now, how do you do that? First, have a money talk with your partner. In this talk, identify your money goals and assess your combined net worth. After that, think of the financial obligations that must be met in order to meet your goals. Then identify the necessary expenditures that you need to incur for the proper operation of your home. 6. Involving Other Family Members in Managing Money As married couples, you may have children or other dependents. Consider including them in your financial planning or management. That is extremely important because it helps you work to meet everyone’s needs and keep your family happy. Thus, it strengthens the bonds between family members because everyone understands the financial situation of the family and can even opt to make some sacrifices for family-wide happiness. By being transparent in your financial communications with family members, you can save money for more important projects, plan for future eventualities, and undertake many other worthwhile financial projects. I have written extensively on how to make or engage family members in the financial planning of families. I hope this will be helpful for you. Please find that post here, as it will provide you with more information on this topic. 7. Protecting Your Money An important part of money management that is often missed by everyone is how to protect your money and other monetary assets. Is your money safe? How do you protect them effectively? You must always keep these questions in mind, especially in our current world. First of all, you must protect yourself from identity theft. Identity thieves can use your identity to get access to your money and other assets. So, don’t leave financial documents and your confidential information where they can easily be accessed. Also, beware of phishing scams. Here, strangers come to you pretending to be who you trust and try to get to reveal financial documents and confidential information with them. Then they use your information to access your money. This is often perpetrated through computer spyware and sometimes through phone calls from scammers pretending to be your bank’s representatives. Be alert and think fast when dealing with people regarding your money. Finally, think of a proper way to protect your passwords and credit card information from the full glare of everyone. Make passwords that cannot be easily predicted. Beware of where you enter your bank or credit card information. 8. Saving and Investing Your Money Saving and investment are critical to money management principles and must be considered by every couple. Here, I don’t mean to be extremely frugal. While living your life, you must save some portion of it for future projects and eventualities. For example, you may consider saving to buy a house or cater for your children’s education and retirement. These are critical if you want to live comfortably in the future. While today is good, who knows whether tomorrow will be the same? You must consider investing parts of your money so that the money will continue to yield money for you into the foreseeable future. I have always advised my friends and family that investment plays a major role in their money management process. But remember, not all investment opportunities are the same. You must do the needed research and consult with experts to guide your decision on which investment to make. Many people have lost millions of dollars because they made the wrong investment decisions. You must not be one of them. 9. Managing Your Debts In our recent economy, most people get into debt. This is partly due to economic conditions such as inflation and bad luck. On the other hand, people are also responsible for becoming indebted. Why? Some people pay little attention to their finances, have no or not enough savings, and want to live beyond what they earn. Whatever the situation may be, if you are in debt, you must sit down with your partner and work to defray it as soon as possible. First, take stock of all your debts. After that, you can work to pay them with the help of budgeting. Budgeting is helpful as it will help you track all your income and expenditures. This further allows you to cut down on unnecessary spending to cater to the payment of your debts. I always believe that preventing a situation is better than working to come out of it after you have been caught up in it. So, I think you should always avoid getting indebted. That can be done by adopting good money behaviors like saving and investing. Saving and investing help you build a money buffer such that in case of difficult situations you have some money somewhere to rely on instead of going for a loan. 10. Knowing Your Net Worth The process of money management largely depends on your ability to assess your net worth. How much are money and assets worth? Answering this question is the first step to follow to help you plan and manage your finances. So, take stock of all your assets and money. You can do that by requesting reports and statements from your bankers and valuations of all your other assets. Also, take stock of all your liabilities, including all expenses for the day-to-day functioning of your home. Make sure you capture all expenses. After that is done, subtract your total liabilities from your total assets. The result of that is your net worth. It can be positive when your total assets are higher than your total liabilities, suggesting that you own more than you owe. It can also be negative if your total liabilities are higher than your total assets, meaning you owe more than you own. Knowing that you can manage your money effectively 11. Planning Your Estate and Will As we all know, no one will remain in this world. So, you must plan for the future after you are no more. Depending on your context, death often causes lots of problems regarding the properties and assets left behind by the deceased. Therefore, you might consider planning your estate and will when managing your money. You must know that estate planning is every bit as important as saving for your child’s college education or putting away money for your retirement. Your estate plan typically includes the following components: your will, documents that substitute for your will, trusts, tax considerations (with the idea of minimizing taxes), various types of insurance, and items related to your particular circumstances, such as protectingyour business or setting aside money to pay for your healthcare costs or nursing home in your later years. Based on this, you must consider the planning of your estate and will. This will help your family manage your assets and money after your demise. Check out the seven components of financial planning processes for your family here. Final Thoughts I hope this article has been useful to you. The 11 tips provided in this article are critical to the proper management of money by couples. I entreat you to follow them to help you manage your money effectively. Thank you for staying around.