Corporations nowadays treat many of their employee training sessions as business games, with the idea that playing a game is a lot more interesting and engaging for the average person than having to learn some dry business theory, possibly without any immediate application to one’s job. Has it ever occurred to you that by treating saving money as a business game it might be easier for you and your family to stay focused on the goal of spending less? I’ve tried it myself and I’ll tell you: it’s one of the best tips to save money that I know.
It’s a team effort, so that means getting the team together at least once a week to discuss saving money strategies as well as individual progress reports, honest feedback about how each member of the family/team did in the previous week when it came to spending less. Not only are you more likely to successfully, as a family, achieve your goal of saving more money over the long run, it will be quality time that can pay dividends in other ways.
It’s no time to browbeat anyone. Sharing the fact that the family might have taken a couple of hours to clip coupons, and subsequently saved $30 off the weekly grocery bill, not only makes everybody feel better it also gives you momentum for the coming week to continue to try and save. On top of that, you did save $30 that would’ve disappeared otherwise.
It may seem contrived to call the family a “team” that’s trying to “win” at something, but the proof is in the pudding, and if the results show the method of saving money as a business game is working, why not continue to employ it? With the slow economy and high unemployment it’s more important than ever for families to lower their overall budgets and it cannot be done with mom and dad alone deciding that it must be. Engage the whole family in the effort: you have nothing to lose but bad spending habits.