Family-Finances-Food-Health-Love

We know parenting is not for the faint hearted.  But hey, parenting Gen Z has to be the most challenging of all the generations past.  My husband and I are constantly battling over the obsessive use, thought, and desire over technology.   We delayed as long as we could with giving my 13 year old a Smart phone.  Then one day he used the “poor me, everybody has fortnight and I don’t. I don’t have friends because I have never played fortnight...” and on and on he went about how disadvantaged and excluded he is from his peers because we won’t buy him an X-box or an upgraded Play Station and we won’t give him a Smart phone.  I don’t know about you but when my child says he’s excluded from social circles because his parents won’t give him a certain thing everyone is into, that breaks my heart.  It’s not like we can’t afford to give it to him but I just see ZERO value in gaming and wasting hours on it.

I don’t mind it when they use it for productive activities like research, gaining useful skills and knowledge for their future adulthood but it so bothers me when they idle their time on mindless games in the name of gaining “strategic skills”.  Strategic skills my foot. Nothing prepares a person for strategic skills like real life situations do. I can see those choices building my son up into a BAN - a Boy in a man’s body.

Anyway, I have just confiscated my 13yo’s smart phone for a week, with an additional day added for every time he tries to talk me out of it.  I’ve been lenient and had back tracked 2 days, so he’s now on 8 days and counting.  I’ve told him for every mention of a gaming opportunity he tries to secure in his conversation to me, the ban will extend by another day.  I am seriously so sick of our conversations just being about games the whole time.  This can’t be good for any child.  

For years, my husband and I paid Private Health Insurance and got back next to nothing.  Yes, we were young, healthy, required no glasses, and dental was probably the only thing we would claim - and even then, we always ended up paying for gaps!  We were busy, didn’t really question why we were paying all that premium.  We just thought if we didn’t pay now, we’ll end up paying more later because we won’t be entitled to the government levy when we needed the cover.  We didn’t even know we could swap health funds and pay less and still maintain the same cover if we could find another health fund offering a better premium.  

20+ years of paying private health insurance later, I found that we could have gotten more out of the years of premium we were paying if only we were more intentional about what we were insuring ourselves against. Well, better late than never, I suppose.  Hence I’m such an advocate for reviewing your health insurance cover annually.  In fact, all your insurances need a review annually, but that’s another blog for another day!

If you haven’t reviewed your private health insurance for the past few years, you’re likely to be over or under insured, and paying for the wrong cover. 

Secondly, finding the right person who knows where you’re at in life and who understands the health care needs of your family is just as important.

Having spoken to so many customer service people within the same company and other competitors, I found them all lacking in their ability to help me find the best cover at the best price possible.

This is where you need a good private health insurance broker.  I recently stumbled on a very knowledgeable lady who knew the different products from the different private health funds.  Contact Jennie Howard at Choosewell and I’m sure you’ll not be sorry. If you can, ask specifically for Jennie Howard because that lady was awesome.  The best part is, you too can earn $50 vouchers if you recommended your family/friends.  Everyone can benefit from a good referral - not a sales person who will sell you anything, but a person who can genuinely help you.  Jennie Howard at Choosewell is a genuinely good referral.

Are you out of ideas on how to teach your children how to manage their money? I have 2 kids under 13 yrs old.  I don’t like the idea of them carrying cash and neither do I want to pay $5 per month for fees for a transactional bank account nor have them accessing their long term savings.  I want to be able to pay them for chores of which they can spend on what they desire, with the hope that they learn how to eventually make wiser decisions with the resources they have and try and be better manager of their cash.  I think I found a solution I’m pretty happy with for $2.50 per month.  The cards are cool and appealing to kids.  I have peace of mind they are not going to squander away the long term savings I have diligently been putting aside for them.  (I have another higher interest bearing account without a debit card.)  And finally, I have a tool that I can teach my kids money management.  This cool Debit Card is Spriggy! 

I’d be interested to hear what you think of Spriggy. If you have any creative ways to teach your kids money management, please leave a note!

About 6 months ago, I decided to give making my own face cream a go.  We’ve started going organic a couple of years ago and I’ve tried various organic facial creams but I didn’t take a liking to any of the brands I tried. I found myself forking out $70-80 every couple of months for creams that was just blah.   So in my own little kitchen I mixed these ingredients up in a double boiler (all it is, is a bowl over a pot of boiling water) in my kitchen for less than $10.  In fact I had most of the ingredients in my pantry already except for the Vitamin E and Almond Oil which I got from the local pharmacist and still have spare.  That one batch has lasted me 6 months with another month leftover. I have used it on my face, arms and legs every day and night, as a lip balm, on my head during winter, healed a patch of chronic dry skin on my leg that I hadn’t been able to get rid off (it’s now completely gone) and even on my sunburn.  My daughter uses it too when she has dry skin. The best thing is it acts like a primer for my face.  This little concoction is more than amazing and cost almost nothing! http://pinsandprocrastination.com/silky-cocoa-butter-body-lotion/ 

Change is stressful and how we deal with change will greatly impact our future in more ways than one.  Your health, careers outcome, relationships, how long you live can all be affected, which will have an overflow into your legacy and your offsprings.  It can be long lasting. Change however is inevitable, and it seems to be apart of life, and increasingly so as you enter adulthood.

There’s small changes, and there’s huge changes.  It’s the huge changes that we have to look out for.  Especially changes that we have no control over due to uncertainties it will have on our plans.  It’s natural to want to be take the wheel and to want to control the outcome when we face uncertainty.

We take pre-emptive moves but sometimes those threats are perceived rather than real.  Sometimes the change causes uncertainties that causes us to take the incorrect pre-emptive moves.  Ever done that?  What was the outcome?

In situations where the best case scenario is still to wait it out, what do you do?  I don’t know about you, but I’ve learnt to let go of the wheel, pray and trust in God to take over the wheel.  Might sound like a clutch to some, but hey, when your world is spinning, a clutch is always handy. No shame about that.

Whether you’re doing renovations or paying off a mortgage or just living day to day, Cash is King, no matter where you’re at in life.

Cashflow management is critical to my family, especially right this moment.  We’ve overspent at Christmas and at our last two holidays.  We were in denial for a bit at first thinking there must be some bank mistake or fraudulent activity but unfortunately it was not so.  So we  found ourselves in a position where we’ve had to tighten our belt for the next few months.

Financial management starts with managing your cashflow.  I’ve been looking for an app for a long time to help track my cashflow instead of the spreadsheet.  I’m pretty good with spreadsheets, but doing cashflow on spreadsheets has its limitations which can be time consuming if you are trying to track an accurate daily balance.  There may be times when you are so tight with your financial management that a close daily tracking is useful but the time spent tracking on spreadsheet can outweigh the benefit of doing it.

So I went searching for one again but this time, I wasn’t searching for an smartphone/tablet app.  I found the Balance Forecasting online software and tested it out.   Entering recurring transaction on a laptop or PC is much easier and faster than trying to do tasks like that on a smartphone or even a tablet – plus my eyesight isn’t the best.  But if you do have to resort to updating your cash forecast app on your smartphone or tablet, the website is responsive to the device you’re using.  Charting of the bank account balance is also an available function which is really helpful for tracking that you don’t go below zero at a glance at any point in time.  It also allows you to tick off a transaction as paid so it adjusts the bank account balance accordingly, taking it off the list once the date has passed.  For only US$19.95 per year, this online software will save me so much time and will be a very important tool for these next few months.

In fact, once we’ve passed this tight few months, I will continue to use it to achieve a serious saving plan.

I’ve also tested it out as a balance forecasting tool for my workplace.  The tag pie chart has some bugs so it’s useless but the line chart is sufficient for getting a feel of where things will be.  I prefer prettier charts with more data labels on the charts for management reporting purposes but I can easily export the data on cvs and churn out prettier charts on Excel.  I think this will replace my current spreadsheet for our cash balance forecasting.  Wondering if anyone else is using this for their work cashflow forecasting?

What do SMSF, Kombucha and Bitcoin have in common?

They are the in-thing, exciting, risky, out there, appears very complex and they’ve been the things we’ve been talking about in our household recently.

I’ll talk more about SMSF in my coming posts but let’s just say for now that it’s a growing vehicle in the financial planning sector.  My husband and I started our own SMSF in January 2016 and bought a residential property through it.  So keep tuned in about our experience with starting our own SMSF and the property purchase.

Kombucha – if you haven’t already heard about Kombucha, it’s a probiotic drink that is supposed to do lots of good for your guts and your health in general.  If you think about it, a healthy gut is a start to healthy a lifestyle.  Anyway, finance does come in here (I am an accountant after all).  Kombucha is expensive.  About $4-5 for a 330ml bottle.  So if you’re into it, it’s as costly as smoking.  So I’ve decided we’ll make our own.  Turned out not bad after all with very little effort.  Feel free to leave any questions on our Kombucha!

Bitcoin – so with all the hype and a family friend getting into it, it’s brought up a lot of interesting discussion in our family.  Should we get into it too?  Well, I’ll get into this a little more later on as well.  Investing is my favorite past-time.

For now, I just wanted to introduce myself and say that life is complex.  As a person who values good financial, spiritual, mental and physical health as key to successful living, I will be blogging what matters to me – sharing my life so others can glean into it and get something out of it as well.  So if you’re just dropping by, I want to welcome you to my first blog.  I hope you’ll leave a little note to say Hi.