Never see your paycheck credit as just SMS, See that as reminder for you to setup the budget day with yummy dinner.
Monthly Budget Day:
Why it is important to setup the family budget day every month ? As a head of the family it is your responsibility to understand goals of every members in your family. Upon monthly salary credit just give a call to your spouse and understand their favorite food. Try to do a small dinner setup in the home with proper lightings like restaurant style. You can name this day as Budget Day it can be a monthly first week Friday.
Dinner Setup on Budget Day:
Understand the Wishlist of food items from each individual of your family members . Finally you will end up something like below list
- Beef or Pork Liver fry for a – Father
- Yummy fruit salad for – Mother
- Fried chicken & Burger for your Spouse
- Your kids needs cakes, Chocolates
- For you a coke with Pizza
In order to make it better:
Option A ) Instead of asking their own wish you can prepare your own food list and observe which one they choose more on the provided month. You can observe the left over food is not liked by any of your family members so you can avoid it from the next month.
Option B) Leave the selection of food not to be self selected. For example, Grand parents will be selecting the food for grand children and vice-versa. It will create more family bonding.
Sit together and start dinner:
All the family members should assemble on the dinning table , no one should be left for preparing something in the kitchen. Start sharing the love and delicious food together. Mid of dinner let’s start hearing their plans and expectation for the ongoing month. Be very transparent with your income and expenses with each and every individual of your family.
Collect the expenses & wants:
As a family you must already know the fixed expenses but you need to know from your family members about their wants. Here some examples of wants
- Your elder daughter might need a drawing book or color pencils
- Your father might required to visit a temple / relative family
- Your parents / spouse might need to present something good for their friends wedding
- Your spouse might need a modern jewelry set or necklace.
Your goal is to provide equal importance for their wants and openly communicate your 30% of the income needs to go for the long term investments. Try to set the time boundary for individual wish list and fulfil them one by one.
Bottom line:
with help of the family budget day all the family members come know
- The list of expenses the family is spending
- You provide value to every family member & they feel like they heard.
- You know the expectation of your family member and you can guide them or make them to understand the other priorities.