Have you ever considered how similar running a business is to taking care of a family? There are certain criteria that need to be met for both operations to run as smoothly and seamlessly as possible.
In Catering for a family and its finances, you’d have to plan out a budget to take care of your family’s needs, or to make sure they are well provided for if the worst should happen. Today, we’re going to look at the seven family finance tips that you can adopt to ensure financial success.
Come Up with A Budgeting Plan
Good sensible day to day family finance stems from having a budget in place and learning how that works. Budgeting also helps to deal with every day issues such as over spending or managing on a restricted income.
Finding out how incomings such as Revenue match outgoings and how these are both managed, can help someone starting out a family to learn how to develop and manage their own budgets long term. You might not think so but planning a weekly shop and knowing exactly how much you have to spend on it can teach you a lot about how to manage bigger budgets, where every single cent count. It’s sometimes the smaller things that can help you imagine the bigger picture.
Compare Your Family Finance Goals to Your Personal Finance Goals
Your chief aim as a family man or woman might be to simply grow and expand your finances over time. To do this, you’ll need to save more money than you borrow. This provides a juxtaposition to the aim of your family and personal finance, which is to save more for the future. There sometimes needs to be a balance between the two to succeed in life, and many people don’t always put this into practice. Finding the right mix of investing and saving that works best for you will not only help your family finances grow, but also help your personal finance too.
Think about saving more money when times are good, so that when things aren’t going so well, you can have a nest egg to fall back on, as well as a little extra to invest and hopefully boost your fortunes again longer term.
Keep on Top of Your Outgoings
If you know exactly what your costs are, you’ll find it much easier to make better financial decisions. Knowing exactly what your outgoings are, compared to what you have coming in will put you in a unique position to understand how to change your finances and move it forward further down the line. Not only that, it will put you in better control of the situation if you start to lose money.
Invest in A Pension
In a typical family set up, and if both partners are employed, it’s likely they’ll have a company pension scheme in place or will have made their own plans. Just as you’d sign up for something similar if you were in a corporate environment, as a responsible family man or woman, you should investigate protecting yourself and your partner and family under a workplace pension scheme.
Have A Retirement Or ‘Should the Worst Happen’ Plan…
No-one likes to think about bad things happening, but it’s a fact of life that illness, injury, or just plain and simple old age will catch up with us at some point. In those times you might want to think about giving up your business, or simply letting it continue without you at the helm.
There are many changes we know might come to us, such as retirement, but we can’t plan in such a clear way for things like a divorce, or ill health, or even substantial changes to the economy. Make a clear and well thought out plan for these times in terms of finance and cover every eventuality. If necessary, involve any financial institutions who may need to step in and help in dire circumstances.
Who Will Inherit Your Wealth at The End of The Road?
Again, it’s a point that not many people want to think about or discuss, but just as you need to think about a plan for times of trouble, you’ll also need to think about a plan in the event of your untimely death. Someone dying intestate can create problems for the family members who are left behind, especially the ones who haven’t made any provisions.
Draw up a ‘will’ and make sure it is legal and water tight. You need to know that in the event of a premature death, assets including your business are transferred over to the people that you want them to go to – and to make sure you have discussed the situation with those same people too, so they’re aware and not left in a state of shock and bewilderment.