With the economic uncertainty created by COVID-19 unlikely to disappear anytime soon, now is the perfect time for families to start thinking about their financial planning. You can never be too careful when it comes to your family finances, so here are five tips for protecting yours.
Understand The Purpose Of Your Plan
If you want your financial planning to be useful, you need to understand exactly what you are trying to achieve with it. Some people are looking to get a better grip on their finances, whereas others are making essential cutbacks because their current financial situation isn’t sustainable. Both of these groups will want to approach their financial planning differently. Knowing the purpose of your financial planning is, therefore, important. If you are simply trying to rein in your spending and generally leave more money in your bank, you will usually find that making a few small changes to your spending, such as learning how to manage your cash flow from investing (if this is something you do, or are looking to get into), will be more achievable than trying to completely change your approach. On the other hand, if you desperately need to cut back in order to meet essential payment obligations, you should be prepared to take more drastic measures.
Review Your Income And Outgoings For A Month
Before you can make any detailed plans for managing your spending better, you need to know what your current spending levels are. The easiest way of working this out is to monitor your spending over the course of a month, keeping hold of any receipts, invoices, and household bills that you receive, and use these to work out your current spending level. You can then compare this against the amount of money that you have coming in every month in order to work out exactly how much space you have in your budget.
Start By Paying Off Your Debts
The first thing that anybody looking to improve their financial situation should do is to pay off as many of their existing debts as possible. Shoring up your finances is always going to be more difficult if you have outstanding debts eating into any money that you do manage to save. If you aren’t able to pay your debts off on time, you should contact your lender to ask about setting up a more manageable payment schedule. Most lenders would rather get something back than nothing at all, so it is always worth asking.
Be Realistic In Your Budgeting
One of the most common mistakes that people make when they are devising a personal or a family budget is to be too ambitious in their cutbacks. If you are trying to force yourself to save an unrealistic amount of money then think about gaining cash flow from investing, of course, you will be setting yourself up for failure.If you take the time beforehand to properly assess your finances, it shouldn’t be too hard to work out a realistic and achievable budget for your family.
Move Into A Modern Home
Older homes tend to have a lot of character. But if you compare them to those created by Australian building icons Coral Homes, they come with many costs. Perhaps the most obvious is old roofing, but there are many others.
New homes, however, don’t come with the same limitations. Maintenance costs are lower, allowing your budget to stretch further.
But if you believe your best option is to maintain the home you already live in, you can opt for a stress-free home loan to help you upgrade your home. For example, you will find low-rate renovation loans from Plenti available at a great rate, specially made for you. These loans are tailored to your needs and based on your credit history. This way, you wouldn’t have to break the bank to spruce up your current home.
Wills And Life Insurance
No one wants to think about dying and leaving their families behind, but it is much better to make plans for this eventuality than to leave things up to chance. Writing a will ensures that your estate will be divided up as you wish, and your assets distributed the way you want them to be. In some cases, the absence of a will can cause issues for your family and dependents. Similarly, don’t forget about life insurance – an important piece of financial protection for your family and dependents. Life insurance means that should the worst occur and you or your partner dies unexpectedly, your dependents can collect a payout. With the right approach to financial planning, you can easily reduce your spending and build up your bank balance. Creating a financial plan is the first step to financial freedom, so start planning for your financial future today.
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