Coming Home Series - V

To consider in what areas you can cut back and downsize, here are some things to discuss with your spouse:

1)      Assess your largest expenses. For most those are mortgages, car payments, student loans, and credit card payments. You need to prayerfully consider ways to lower these expenses and assess which expenses you will be able to continue to manage on a single income.

If your vision budget will not cover your large expenses, you will have to investigate ways to eliminate and/or lower these expenses to fit within your vision budget.

2)      In what ways can you decrease the expenses spent on food?

Are there ways that you can decrease your food bill each month?

Ask yourself, how often do we eat out each month?

Can we eat at home less to avoid costly restaurant meals?

Can we pack snacks for the road so that we are not required to pick up fast food?

If you do not know how much you’re putting out on food each month, develop a record similar to your financial budget that shows how much you are spending each month for groceries.

Meal planning is a very smart way to develop a more cost effective plan for feeding your family. With a meal plan, each week or each month you plan out the specific meals that you plan to prepare for each day of the week. With the list of meals, you shop for the main ingredients that you’ll need for your meals, eliminating the possibility of having to get carry out. Meal Planning… another blog for another day.

 

3)      What purchases are you making that are a “wants” instead of “needs”?

Consider what things you purchase out of personal desire versus a want. I’ll save the time listing things as examples. If you do some self-reflection, I’m sure that you can think of some things that you can live without in order to save.

Once you have assessed these areas, you can develop a get-well plan outlining the specific steps you need to take that will help you reach the goals outlined in your vision budget.

For example, if you need to eliminate a credit card bill from your list of expenses make a list of practical steps that can help you reach your goal, (i.e., Stop making purchases that you do not have cash for, pay additional funds in the amount of $______ on your credit card payment to pay it down quicker, etc.)

With two incomes, as your salaries may increase its common for people to just buy more things instead of putting the money into savings or they purchase things on credit digging themselves more into debt. As you go through this process, you may find that you spend a considerable amount of funds on things that you do not necessarily need. As you go through this exercise with your husband, generate executable steps that you’ll need to take to reach the vision budget that you’ve developed.