Basic Family Budgeting Tips for Beginners
Caution, small daily precautions and a look to the future. Saving money every month without sacrifice, starting from small amounts, is possible (and often necessary).
In the beginning it was the mattress, which has become synonymous with a place to keep savings. Today, beyond the clichés, we know that keeping money in the bedroom (or any other room in the house) is not the best solution.
In addition to a question of security, there is also convenience: keeping cash blocked does not protect money, which tends to lose value over time. Luckily, the tools for managing savings have evolved: you don’t have to go to the bank to do most of your operations; keeping a family budget has become easier, without the accumulation of receipts and paper folders. Even a tool like the piggy bank (whose logic still proves effective today) has gone digital and, after saving an amount of money, it is a good idea to invest it, for example, in cryptocurrency.
In other words: what makes the difference is our approach to money, but the increasingly intuitive technology can help us with the help of the best budgeting apps. Here is, for starters, a practical guide suitable for everyone to save money every month.
Contents
What are some Basic Family Budgeting Tips for Beginners?
Now let’s see some simple basic tips that everyone can apply to improve their relationship with money.
Tracking your expenses: advice that is not taken for granted
The advice is trivial only in appearance. In reality, there are few families who accurately track their expenses. Often we focus on some and leave out others. Still, tracking your expenses is the necessary step to start saving.
It would therefore be advisable to keep an eye on the daily purchases made for grocery shopping, shopping or outings for lunch or dinner, as well as looking at the most substantial fixed expenses such as rent, bills, installment payments.
Distinguish your purchases by categories
When you think about how to plan a family budget, categories are a good way to start. It is an immediate way to understand which are the most substantial items and start thinking about where possible “savings pockets” lurk.
Doing so is easier and easier, also thanks to applications that automatically record and segment spending. It will be enough to integrate this digital register with the receipts of the expenses made in cash.
Establish your budget
Now that you have a clearer picture of your spending, you can compare it to your income. This is the step that allows you to have an eye on a real family budget. Aspiring savers will be able to allocate a budget for each item of expenditure, to be refined over the months in order to set the first savings targets.
Identify short and long term goals
Saving is a process that looks to the future by passing through daily stages. In other words: it intertwines short and long-term objectives, which must be distinguished and supported in parallel. Focusing only on the first courses (such as a holiday or a much desired whim) could prove to be a short-sighted approach; betting everything on the second (like a mortgage or a high-figure investment) could be frustrating. The watchword is “balance”.
The piggy bank never sets
Small daily savings and consistency allow surprising sums to be set aside. The good old piggy bank still works, although today it takes on more practical and efficient forms. Even the piggy bank becomes digital: connected to your account, it can automatically withdraw small amounts on a regular basis, or set aside a rounding up of daily shopping.
When to save money?
This advice overturns the most common savings approach. Usually, we tend to put aside “what is left over” at the end of the month, when the money is running out. Instead, it would be advisable to do the opposite: set aside the expected fixed expenses and what is needed to reach the savings targets at the beginning of the month, when the money is there.
And after saving? We need to invest
Keeping savings steady means seeing their value erode over time. Better to “move them”, that is to invest them, in products that allow an approach “by small steps”. Solutions such as investing in cryptocurrency with operations like buy Dogecoin is a good way to see your savings grow. If putting money aside in the piggy bank is the right solution for short-term goals, investing may be the right way to consider when looking at a medium-long term horizon.
