You might have grown up in a family where one parent was solely responsible for the finances. You may have been taught that talking about money was rude, or it may have been a general source of stress in your family because there was never enough.
Either because one parent was a careless spender or because you really needed more money to make ends meet. Whatever the situation in your family of origin was, if you didn’t have much guidance about finances growing up, you may feel a little lost about how to do so in your own family.
However, understanding how to manage personal finances is a great skill to pass on to your children.
Why it Matters
Money, as the saying goes, isn’t everything. However, smart money management can give you an enormous amount of freedom while poor personal finance can mean your life is much more difficult than it has to be.
Good habits can start in childhood. Unfortunately, without the guidance of parents, kids often don’t learn much about personal finance and end up repeating many of their parents’ mistakes alongside their own.
Talking to your kids about money and demonstrating responsible behavior can begin when they are young and continue into young adulthood. You could even think about investing for kids, where you will teach them from the start how they could use their money wisely.
Establishing Stability
As part of your commitment to making personal finance an important part of your family life, you may want to look into ways to save more money.
Cutting your spending is one of the most important ways to bring some stability to what may have previously been a lifestyle of living paycheck to paycheck.
One way to do this is with a marketplace online that helps you identify partnerships offering various personalized rates. These might include good offers for life insurance, refinancing student loans, personal loans, high yield savings accounts, and home and auto insurance.
Budgeting
Once you have figured out some places where you can save money, consider making a family budget. This can be a great project to get your kids involved in, not because they need to be worried about how you’re going to pay the rent or mortgage but because it’s an opportunity to involve them in low-stakes decisions.
Such as whether you’ll order pizzas for family night or cook homemade ones and use the savings toward your vacation fund. Giving kids a chance to make some decisions about money and see the impact of those decisions can be an interesting and powerful lesson.
Communicating
It’s important that talk about finances should not be taboo in your family. You don’t have to specifically discuss how much money anyone makes, but if you tend to be uncomfortable around the topic of money, it’s time to put that aside so that you can regularly bring up finances in casual conversation. With young kids, you can cut out coupons and discuss the prices of everyday items.
As kids get older, you can talk about savings, debt, interest, and investing. If you feel as though you don’t know much about these topics yourself, learning together is always an option.
