One of my close friends unexpectedly found herself in charge of her family’s finances for the first time and asked me for some help with budgeting and financial planning.
I adore all things financial so this sounded like a lot of fun to me, but my friend “Emily” pretty much thought it was the worst drudgery life could have dreamed up. (Coincidentally, that is exactly the same way I felt about shoe shopping, which is one of her favorite things.)
So we embarked on our journey and I tried to make it less painful with the help of technology and Pinterest but I found that I missed the mark a bit when she told me that whenever they ran out of money in one of their budgeted categories for the month, she would tell her kids that she would like to let them go to the movies or get ice cream but her financial planner would be mad, and thus I came to be known as the “fun killer” by all of the kids. I needed to up my game a bit and try harder, so I came up with three ideas to lose my hated nickname.
- If you budget for fun things, it doesn’t seem like such a chore. I love traveling, and one year we were taking a trip and we instituted “house of darkness” for the three months prior. We turned off all unnecessary lights and took shorter showers, so we had extra fun money for our trip. It didn’t seem so hard when we were saving for something we all really wanted to do.
- There are things you “love” spending money on and things you could really care less about. Emily loves shoes and new outfits, but couldn’t care less about the brand of yogurt she eats or the speed of the internet. So if she is frugal in areas she doesn’t care about, she has more to spend on those she does.
- Gamify your budget. If I turn on the miles per gallon indicator on the car, and challenge my husband by bragging I can get better gas mileage then he can, game on! I will admit that I do sometimes tell one of my kids, “Well your brother is maxing out his Roth IRA this year, are you sure you can’t contribute $20 more per month?” The idea of “winning” is a powerful motivator.
So I won’t say that I have lost my status as “fun killer” but maybe I have downgraded to “not the most fun but still okay to be around”
