Some Fun Budgeting Ideas
Budgeting can be fun? Actually, in the current economy, making a budget requires a lot of creativity and planning, which can be made into a really fun adventure for the whole family. Some fun budgeting ideas include creating a household competition to see who can recycle the most, use the least amount of resources or save the most money. Such activities would see kids clipping coupons, rinsing cans and bottles for the recycle bin and even using timers when brushing their teeth or taking a shower. The winner could get a special treat or the chance to pick out what the family will eat for dinner.
Why should people be thinking about the budgeting of so many things in their homes? Realistically, it isn’t just about the money, but also about the use of all resources. When parents and families institute fun budgeting programs, they are training themselves to save money but also to be attentive to any waste that is occurring.
For example, some statistics from Great Britain revealed that the total amount of leftover food thrown away in the course of a single year was 6.7 million tons. Clearly this figure is probably much higher in the United States and paying attention to the amount of food that we consume or waste is a really important and financially responsible behavior.
This means that some really fun budgeting ideas can also create great results where household finances are concerned, but also where the planet is concerned as well. Additional fun budgeting ideas would include families gardening to grow some of their own food, or stage a competition to see who can yield the most tomatoes, lettuce, peas or carrots. Creating many different meals from leftovers is a great way to discover new recipes and prevent waste. Building water collecting systems to reduce a family’s water bills and save natural resources is another good plan.
Do all fun budgeting ideas have to involve resources and lots of effort? No, actually just sitting down and drafting a budget is something a lot of people have never done. With the use of a standard computer, creating a budget can be a creative and educational experience. There are many online resources for blank budget templates which include the most common items that appear in a budget, but anyone can analyze how they spend their money and draft their own worksheet.
With a basic worksheet in hand, you can then determine where each and every penny they spend actually goes. Some people are surprised to see how much their morning cup of coffee and bagel at the local coffee shop actually adds up to in the course of the year. A really fun budgeting idea would be to track the difference in expenditures between a daily stop at the coffee shop versus making coffee and buying bagels or muffins in bulk to bring to the office each day.
The most important thing to do with a budget is to be realistic. It might look like a great idea on paper to give up eating out entirely, but if both heads of the household work full-time and the kids have extracurricular activities in the evening, it might not be realistic to have the time for cooking every night. And while movie tickets might be expensive, going out and having fun is priceless. One solution would be to limit these kinds of activities to a fixed number of times a month.
A more flexible way to budget for fun activities is to budget a small amount of money each week for fun, and set this aside as cash in a big glass jar. If you’re strapped for time one night, order pizza, using money from the jar. But if you let it build up over several weeks, you’ll have enough for the whole family to go out for ice cream and a movie, or maybe a family trip to the zoo.
There are tons of fun creative ways to budget, and you don’t have to do them all, or even budget for every single thing you spend money on. Even keeping track of one aspect of spending can help bring spending under control and improving your outlook about money in general.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Budgets & Money Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
