Tip number one: Expect the unexpected. The unexpected happens all the time. We should come to expect it. Houses break, cars break and people break. And when they break it’s going to cost money. It just is and the only thing unexpected about that is that we don’t know who’s going to break or when they’re going to break. We don’t know if it’s going to to be the house or the car or a kid, or ourselves. But it’s going to happen. It happens all the time. We just don’t know when and we don’t know who, but we do know that it will happen. So, save for that time when it happens. Expect the unexpected. 

Tip number two: Pretend that you make less than you do. I’m not a numbers person. When we talk numbers, my eyes glaze over. My husband gets out his spreadsheet and all the numbers and I’m like “This is not my language.” Fun is my language and imagination is my language. So he gets out his spreadsheet he does his thing and that’s awesome. And some people do that. And if you do that–you go for it! But for some of us, numbers are like another language and we don’t understand, and it just really doesn’t click. But, I can say to myself “We make this much money (imagine a whole pizza here), and I’m going to pretend we make this much money (now imagine ¾ of that pizza). Then when I go to the store and I go shopping for our family, my budget is ¾ of the whole. I pretend this is how much money we make and that way we always have the other ¼ of the money right there for the “unexpected.” The “expectedly unexpected.” 

You know what? Sometimes the unexpected things are fun things that we get to do because we pretended that we made less than we actually made. So I’m going to tell a story. My sister calls me up and she says “Hey, I want to go on a cruise to Mexico.” And I’m like “What?!?!” That sounds so fun, I want to do that! And she’s says “You should come.” And I’m like what!?! I don’t know if we can afford it. But, because I’ve been pretending for so long that we made this much money, I was like I don’t know if we can afford it. But I’m going to find out because that sounds super fun. And because we had been pretending that we made much less money, we had some wiggle room. And we could afford the cruise! And it was so fun and we loved it and it was amazing. So awesome. Pretending can be so cool and adults can do it too! 

I have another story. It was December and we have a large family. December is an expensive holiday, because we save all of our wants for Christmas. So I do lots of shopping and spend lots of money. We save money for December every year so we can go Christmas shopping and have some fun Christmas presents. We just like doing it all at once. It’s just super fun. So Christmas is expensive and you know, we had budgeted for that, but something else happened in December. Our water heater broke. Yeah, that’s thousands of dollars. And then, something else happened. Seriously, this is a true story. Okay, I spent a million kazillion dollars on Christmas (I told you I’m not a numbers person so that could be inaccurate, so don’t quote me). And then, we spent thousands of dollars on a water heater and then guess what else happened? Our van broke. And I think that was like $2,000. I think I kind of remember that number. That’s a lot of money for one month. But, it wasn’t a big deal. You know why? Because we’ve learned to expect the unexpected. We knew it was going to happen sometime. We own cars, cars break. We own a house, things in the house break. It wasn’t unexpected. And so it didn’t ruin our Christmas, it didn’t ruin our month, it didn’t ruin our lives. We didn’t walk around saying “Woe is me.” Because we expected the unexpected and we planned for it, because the unexpected is not so unexpected. And I’d been pretending that we made much less money when we actually made.

Tip number three: Compare. When you compare one want or need to a different want or need, you don’t have to say no all the time. You don’t have to say no. You just ask yourself “Do I want this thing, or do I want the other thing?” One of them is no and one of them is yes, and that’s okay. It’s okay to delay something, because maybe that will be the yes next time, while this first thing is a yes now. So we have a yes and a no, when you compare two things that you want.

Let me give an example. Let’s say that I want a new purse and I also want a new hair dryer. If I know that I can have one and I get a yes then I’m not so sad when I have to tell myself no about the other thing. Because the time will come for the other thing, and I can wait. And that’s fine. So I think to myself, if I have two things that I want, then I can say yes to one and no to one, and it doesn’t hurt so bad to say no. Because you’re saying yes and no, it balances out. And you know what, I’ve wanted some things for years and every time I put it up  next to something else I realize that I actually don’t want it. Or I must not want it that bad. Because when I put up to something else that I want, I wanted the other thing more. So when we compare, we get to say yes more often. And I do this with my kids too, and we do this for our home as well. It helps us understand that a no is okay, and to accept the no because we know in the future it could become a yes. 

Those are my three tips for dealing with money. It’s a part of our everyday lives, but you can have financial peace. You can have peace if you adhere to these three steps: expect the unexpected, pretend you make less than you do and compare things that you want or need to each other so you’re not saying no all the time. You get to say yes sometimes. I challenge you to pick one of these steps, or all three and use them in your life. I think they could be helpful for you. And I’d love to hear of any steps that you use in your family.