What Do You Use To Help You Manage Your Finances And Other Money Questions

Have you seen the money related conversation starter cards circulating in the social media lately?

It is the Financial Service Council NZ teaming up with Hatch investment platform who brings us these downloadable cards that each have a money related question to answer.

I thought I’d do a post series of personally answering a few of these questions in each post and inviting you to share your own answer to the same question in the comments! You can download your own set here.

How do you handle financial emergencies?

Before I started my money journey my initial reaction to tight money situations was often just bury my head in the sand and try to ignore the problem.

This actually happened to me when I arrived in New Zealand. I received a fine that I thought I could just avoid since I wasn’t local (yes, I know, not a great attitude!).

The fine went into collection and I kept dodging phone calls and ignoring emails. This went on for a while, probably nearly a year.

Until I received a very threatening email, got scared and wanted it to just be over so I paid up.

But something very little and what could have been sorted out with a phone call or a couple of emails, snowballed into a $200 bill.

Now I try to get ahead of problems like this, get in touch to sort things out straight away. And it wasn’t just end bill that was upsetting (because $200 was a lot of money to me back then, and still is to a degree) but the stress of the situation, the anxiety of getting phone calls just really wasn’t worth it.

This is why I also saved an emergency fund, and will save one up again, so I do always have something to fall back on.

What money lessons did you learn growing up?

Money wasn’t openly discussed when I was growing up.

Now that I look back I can see that mum did her best with the little she had. She prioritised so we could have most of the things that my sisters and I wanted.

Like relatively expensive hobbies (we all took dance classes from 3 year-olds, one of us even made a career out of dancing, I also did horse riding with summer camps for many years, not cheap).

But we wore second hand clothes, only got new clothes once a year and sometimes as gifts.

Mum only took us overseas a couple of times, when she received a large tax refund a couple of times. Otherwise our holidays with her were within Finland.

We didn’t have everything but we had everything we needed.

But she hid her money struggles from us, which I’m grateful for, but also it made a bit ungrateful at the time. Growing up has made me realise how much effort she put into us having what we needed and what we wanted (to a degree) and I’m so so grateful.

So I guess I learnt that not everything is what it looks and how true the saying “you can have anything you want, but not everything”.

What do you use to help you manage your finances?

I use many things.

I write very broad budgets as guidelines to my spending, but I’m going to try to write a more detailed one to help get me back on track.

I also put reminders on my phone to remind of payments that come out my account because I use a zero based budget and often I don’t have much money so bigger bills fail unless I transfer money back.

There’s also lots of excel spreadsheets on my computer tracking different things.

For example savings charts, spending trackers, mortgage payment tracking, net worth tracking, and various investment trackers (dividends, amounts invested, portfolio etc.).

For motivation and inspiration I read personal finance books and follow personal finance Instagram accounts.

You can find other money questions and my answers here.

I’d love to hear your answers to these questions in the comments below!