Family Finances... That Part of Family Life We Love to Hate

A family is more than just the sum of the relationships between it's members. A family is even more than a legally binding arrangement among the people who form that family. Like it or not, a family is also a business entity. Like any business, a family must be operated prudently and with careful attention to the financial aspects of the entity.

No one really enjoys this particular aspect of family life. Let's face it. Tending to the business side of the family is demanding work and isn't particularly a lot of fun. Someone in the family is going to have to mind the store, so to speak. Like any job we accept in life, we have to learn how to run our family's financial side. We have to learn how to set budgets, how to handle money and how to properly manage credit accounts. We have to learn how to recognized the avoidable pitfalls. There is a lot to learn and a lot to know, if we are going to successfully accomplish all of these things.

We have to be organized and disciplined in how we run the business. We have to make difficult choices and establish our priorities. And more often than not, the most difficult decisions are the decisions not to spend money on some things we would really like to buy or to do. For most families, we usually are not able to have immediate gratification for the things we want to have. Not only that, we have to focus on the present and also focus on what we will need to have in place in the future, both at the same time. And sometimes someone has to be the bad guy when it comes time to rein things in, when money starts to run short, because that is the point in time when everyone in the family is going to have to make some sacrifices. Making sacrifices with regard to material things is not something that we Americans do willingly.

Running the finances of a family is an important and critical job. It is not a particularly glamorous job, but someone in the family is going to have to do it, if a family is going to survive over the long haul.