MONEY AND TIME MANAGEMENT IS KEY FOR FAMILIES

The first step in balancing a budget for the family is cutting costs. What expenses are easy to forego? Can you cancel your membership in the fitness club and instead go jogging in the forest for free? Helping each other out with childcare instead of hiring a childminder helps significantly to save costs. There is also potential for savings when it comes to shopping: used toys, furniture, household appliances and clothing can also be found inexpensively in second-hand shops and Internet exchanges. In addition, an insurance check makes sense too. You may want to look at Nova Science Publishers for further information and reading.

Your family is the most important thing in your life, so you want to be able to manage your finances and your time with them. You can do it! 

Time management: More structure means more fun 

Time management is the magic word: Bring structure to your everyday family life, organize, prioritize, plan and schedule all your duties and tasks. You will see that this is also a good way to incorporate a little “fun” into your day. And don't worry. Even if that sounds a bit exhausting now, it is actually quite simple and a matter of getting used to. If you stick to your plan, planning and prioritizing will quickly become routine. 

Good planning is half the battle 

Make weekly and daily to-do lists. Have a quick sit down on Sunday and make a note of what's coming up for the next week. What needs to be done as soon as possible? What is tied to fixed dates and what can you plan flexibly? Plan your week roughly and set fixed dates for cleaning, shopping and also for drinking coffee or going for a walk. Also take a close look at your “scaffolding”. How often do you go shopping in a typical week? Wouldn't a bulk purchase be enough? Are there any tasks in which the children can be involved or even take responsibility for them? 

You can carry out such planning with a weekly calendar, in a notebook or diary, as a list or calendar on the mobile phone, or you can design your own bullet journal. You can add thoughts, diary entries and more to this, so that after a few weeks you will have a nice reminder to hand at the same time. 

Attention time killer: Use free time wisely 

Don't just plan your week ahead on Sundays. Every evening, sit down briefly and go over the next day's to-dos. Now plan the day in detail. Is cleaning on Wednesday? Set fixed and realistic time blocks. From 8 a.m. to 10.30 a.m. cleaning takes place. At 11.30 you have to start cooking for lunch. That means: You have almost an hour of free time in between. Take advantage of this. These breaks are important for you and your family.

FINANCIAL FOOTBALL

VISA and the NFL have teamed up to provide a FREE football themed video game to promote people's interest in being financially savvy.  FINANCIAL FOOTBALL is a fast-paced, interactive game that that teaches money management skills while you play.  You can compete on a virtual grid iron in either a one player game or in head-to-head action against a friend by answering finance related question to lead your team across the field to score touchdowns.

Start the game by picking how long you want to play (5 to 20 minutes) and selecting which NFL teams will be going heat-to-head against one another.  Next pick a difficulty setting playing either as a Rookie (Ages 11 -14), Pro (Ages 14-18) or Hall of Famer (18+).  Players then can select defensive and offensive plays with difficulty levels of easy, medium and hard which are followed up with questions about financial literacy and money management that correspond to the selected play's difficulty.  This customization makes the game fun and educational not just for kids but adults as well.

If you get a question right you your team is successful with their play, but if you get the question wrong than your QB will get sacked, your running back hit for a loss, or a wide receiver drops the ball.  The harder the successfully completed question the better your players do so an easy question might get you one or two yards, a medium question 5 yards and a hard question could get you ten yards or maybe even a break away touchdown.

In head-to-head mode players only answer questions on offense.  Whoever does the best will get the best results from their players and win the game! For single player mode, you also have to answer questions on defense with correct answers resulting in sacks, tackles for a loss and interceptions while wrong answers allow the other team to break long runs or have completions in the passing game.  How well you can answer the questions will determine if you are a winner or loser in FINANCIAL FOOTBALL.

FINANCIAL FOOTBALL takes a topic that can be boring and mundane for many kids, as well as adults, and adds some excitement to it that will help ingrain important tips and information into people's heads as their competitive instincts get them involved with this game.  As a parent, I'm always keeping an eye out for opportunities that combine entertainment and education to assist getting kids to embrace learning.

This game created in partnership between the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, Visa's Practical Money Skill's for Life program, and the NFL , has been out for a few years now.  I like to promote it during the NFL season each year because it is a very well done effort to educate people on an important topic in an entertaining way.  I really encourage you to take advantage of this FREE football game.

Available to play online via your personal computer or laptop, FINANCIAL FOOTBALL puts players fiscal knowledge to the test in an online simulation game environment by combining the structure and rules of the NFL with financial education questions of varying difficulty. Visa has also released the game as a FREE iPhone app on iTunes, along with an optimized HD iPad version.  The game can be played in single player mode or against a friend in head-to-head action. It really is a fast-paced, fun game that can be challenging for all ages.

For more information about the FINANCIAL FOOTBALL video game, CLICK HERE.