Fathers & Finances

 Hello everybody!

Welcome back. This week we will be discussing Fathers and Finances.

I think I have not thought about how many families don’t have a present father in their children’s life. Many families are divorced, and often children spend the most time with their moms, thus making their finances life harder.

Fathers make a difference in a family. They are the main provider, and with the help of a wife, they learn to create a budget to manage their money. However, this is not the case in many families. Will VanderToolen once said, “It is a sad truth that it is very rare a family has a budget. Most people just check to see if they have money in the bank and then spend it. They don't have a plan.” If most families do this, can you imagine how quickly their money will go away? Without a specific plan, people will lose control of their money without understanding how they are always at rest. Hereafter there five points to help families make a budget and control their finances, that I consider most important. 

Inventory

VanderToolen said the first step is to take an inventory of payments and other expenses. It is the only way to begin to distinguish between needs and wants, he said. He brings couples through their housing, utilities, food costs, and more. And when he says food costs, he means groceries, eating out, school lunches, vending machine snacks, drinks bought on the way to work, and so forth. Just by looking at where money is going, VanderToolen said most families can easily cut 20 percent from their expenses without noticing any significant lifestyle change.

Advice

Because spending is so tied to lifestyle and emotion, VanderToolen recommends getting some outside advice to look at the finances. But a person could also go to their bank or credit union and ask to speak with a financial advisor. 

Make a budget

The budget is built from the information gathered from taking the inventory. Seeing the actual expenses and the actual income makes it easier to cut where needed. And the cuts keep coming until the budget is balanced. A family can divide his budget into "things we can change" and "things we can't change." For example, the mortgage payment was in the "things we can't change" category. Food was in the "can change" category. After dividing expenses into these two categories, people should list items from the largest to the smallest.

Planning

In some households, the expenses are more than the income. VanderToolen said these situations do need good counseling.

Attitude

The most important thing to start with is your attitude, McCoy said. "People don't have to be afraid that life is all over," she said. "It can be a lot of fun."

I think these steps or strategies to make a budget can be helpful for families. I have seen my dad making a budget every month, and I can see how much it has helped with our finances. He would make an Excel sheet for each month and would organize it under different categories. For example, some of the categories were: food, gas, medicine, or bills. Then he would write down each expense and see how much we spent that month.

Studying finances, especially different strategies that I found in the article I read helped me to see how my father was the greatest example of budgeting. He followed the five points I have discussed because he always started his budgeting plan by dividing the needs and wants of the family. He would set priorities and share his plan with the family. I learned that we should not underestimate the power of planning how to use money. I believe the more families make a budget, the more they will save.


Article- Staying at home: How to downsize from dual to single income, by Michael De Groote. 

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