Money Obedience

We parents know that having kids not only gives us the pleasures and responsibilities of parenthood, but having kids also comes with big financial consequences. As soon as that first child shows up, money can become tight.

When our first child arrived, I made sure that my wife and I took good care of how we spend our money. The first thing we did was record our expenses to see where we actually spent our money and how we can budget ourselves to save more. We used the free expense tool at www.vilkri.com, which we could access from any computer that had an internet hook-up. This was especially important to my wife, who is so busy she tends to forget where she spends her money. Having 24-7 internet access to our budget helped her be very good recording her/our expenses as she made them where she might have had difficulty otherwise. Another advantage of recording our expenses was that we became much more aware of how and when we spent money. I found that just knowing that I’d have to write down every penny I spent (and share that with my wife) gave me incentive not to be so careless about spending money. My wife told me that she had the same reaction to budgeting.

We recorded our expenses for a few months, after which we had a pretty good idea how we spent our money and how we could save some more. Vilkri.com gave us reports that continually analyzed our spending, explained the impact of what we were doing with our money, and showed us how well or poorly our incomes meshed with our budget plans.

Fortunately for us, both my wife and I tend to be fairly frugal. We rarely spend money needlessly, and we’re just as careful with expenditures for our children as we are with spending on ourselves. For example, we try not to overdo it with clothes and toys. I think our kids have a good amount of toys – and honestly, many of them are perfectly good hand-me-downs. When we buy toys we look for those that foster real play such as blocks, puzzles, and the like, and also those that will last or even become heirlooms, like wooden toys, or craft kits. We prefer such toys for our kids, and we buy them as gifts for our friends. It seems to us that these toys also happen to be cheaper than electronic toys, and they sure don’t have the added aggravation of having to buy batteries for them over and over again! Plus, these toys are not as noisy either. Our kids don’t need help making noise anyway…..