Shouldering the responsibilities of both home and the professional front ensuring a steady flow of finances is a tough task for single mothers. Taking calculated decisions safeguards the single mothers throughout their cycle of motherhood.
Here are a few tips to overcome the obstacles:
Earn Like There Is No Tomorrow
One of the greatest challenges for single moms is to raise the kids and that is why budgeting and keeping a track of your earnings as well as spending can be so useful. Setting up an emergency fund for a rainy day, prioritizing the essential and important expenses, and working your way down can help you ignore the non-essential items.
Seeking out new ways and means to earn some extra bucks is although baby steps, it definitely takes you in the right direction. The responsibilities are sky high and hence go an extra mile, go for that raise, even if it means long hours each week. Take that horrifying, terrifying risk — and start that dream business you always thought of or wanted to. Invest in yourself because risk over the long-term is rewarded.
Believe And Accept Reality
Because there is just one breadwinner in your family, you need alternate and extra financial cushions. This includes paying down debt, living within your means, saving for emergencies now, and for the future.
Whether single motherhood found you via unplanned pregnancy, divorce, widowhood, or choice, it can be easy to find yourself looking around at those two-parent families and feeling pressurized to take on a particular lifestyle. Successful single moms do not replicate the nuclear-family lives. They build their own amazing destiny and lives, on their own terms — within their own means.
Pay Off Debts For Good
Getting the basics right, forms the first effective line of building your funds. Figuring out the basic expenses is very simple because it includes expenses like utilities and food, as well as electronics, clothes, and travel. When you divide your income with the basic expenses the remaining money can be discouraging you to even attempt savings for yourself. Take help from an emergency fund that is interest-free while it gives mileage by paying the bills without touching your income.
The less you owe to people, the easier and faster it is to build wealth and attain your goals.
Don’t Ignore Your Retirement
We all want to stretch our limits for our kids, and that often includes helping pay for education, loans and so on which can be particularly heavy on a single parent’s budget.
But at the end of the day, establishing financial security includes taking care of yourself, so that the situation doesn’t reverse and become a burden to your children when you are getting old and gone past the age of earning.
Investing all the time and money for kids’ college is fine as long as you can afford it but it’s equally critical for you to take care of yourself. There’s always financial aid available for kids to pay for college that offers various protections and perks. Meanwhile, you’re very much on your own in retirement.
Save For Both The Short and Long-Term
Maintain a minimum of three months’ living expenses as your target. Pandemic has just been added to the list of common reasons that one comes across like an unplanned expense at some point in your life. You could either experience a firing from your job, medical emergency, or any sudden major expense that can put you under stress.
Never let go of an advantage offered of any investment benefits by your employer, and seek professional advice and decisions about investment strategies that can help you realize your goals. Since you don’t have a spouse, the pressure to save is that much more important, if you don’t want to be a burden on your adult children in the future.
Set Bigger Goals
Struggling financially in comparison to your neighbors and friends might provoke you to fall into the pattern of planning for small and short-term goals like having a little extra at the end of the month.
Before setting goals and all the fundamentals to fulfill them remember to go big with your goals. Whatever the goals may be, there is no looking back, be aggressive and ambitious because single moms have all the force in the world to get to where they want to. So, don’t hold back.
Plan In Advance For New Relationships
Being a single mom throughout your life is an option you can dismiss if you want to start your life all again by entering a new relationship and settling down. This can change the whole set up of your finances.
A very crucial factor to think about before entering a new relationship is to understand your partner’s financial status. Be honest while discussing money talks with your new potential partner and don’t get entangled in the chaos of attempting to cut old financial ties while establishing new ones. The intention should be to minimize tension when you are on the same page regarding money plans, goals, priorities, and budgets.
Keep in mind, too, that a new relationship means a new income source that can highly impact the government benefits that you may otherwise currently qualify for as a single mom.
