Take Control of Your Household Finances

Regular assessment of your household finances is important to the family’s financial well-being. The following tips will help you take charge of your household finances.

Credit Card Use

If you have a credit card, use it, but don’t forget to pay the entire sum, not the minimum amount, at the end of the month. Use your credit card wisely.

Rule of Thumb

Household expenses should be lower than 33% of household income. If it is higher, think of cutting down your expenses. Below are useful tips to cut down your household expenses.

1. Cleaning of air-conditioners should be done regularly.

2. When you do the laundry, do it full load.

3. Put thimbles on your taps

Allocate Book Keeping Reponsibilities to Your Kids

Do you have children? Think of assigning simple tasks such as data-entry to them. This will make them understand basic financial principles. It will also teach them to become responsible and promote good financial practice.

Organize Your Financial Statements

Take note of your finances. Have a notebook or a ledger. If you have an access to a computer, organize the physical bills and statements by putting everything into a spreadsheet. You don’t even have to pay up cash for a spreadsheet.

Here are some tips in organizing your financial statements.

1. To save time from entering data, get soft copies of bills and statements, if possible.

2. Back-up all your files, save them into CD-R or thumb drive. Then keep them in a secure place.

Financial Planning

If there is only one in the household is working, and there is not much sources of income, consider an insurance plan for the breadwinner. Financial worries are not something your family should cope with in the event the sole breadwinner is incapacitated.

Make It a Routine

When you are not doing your task, it piles up. Give at least half an hour each week to analyze your finances.

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Variable Or Fixed What Will Be The Decision

Once you decide to avail a home loan, the next thing that storms your brain is selecting between fixed and floating rate of interest. It is easy to get dumbfounded at this stage if you are not financially trained.

Usually, when the media splashes reports on banks increasing housing loan interest rates in and their affect on Monthly Installments, you deem it better to opt for fixed housing loan rates. In fact, your banker may also propose you to go for the same.

Now ideally as it should be, we assume that once you select fixed rate plan for yourself the rate of interest will continue unchanged for the entire period you have fixed the interest rate for irrespective of any incidental increase in the same. But actually this is not always the situation.

Here we demystify the nature of fixed interest rate home loan transaction for you so that you can make an informed conclusion over the subject.

* Check the small print of a loan. The bank has the right to serve you 30 or 60-days notice that it intends to increase its rates.

* The bank’s first-year rates are binding on the bank only for that short period of 1 or 2 months. The 2nd-year home loan rates are not binding at all. Neither are the bank’s 3rd-year loan rates.

* Force Majeure Clause

So, while you read your housing loan agreement papers, you can spot statement like this:

“Provided further that from time to time, the bank may in its sole discretion alter the rate of interest suitably and prospectively on account of change in the internal policies or if unforeseen or extraordinary changes in the money market conditions take place during the period of the agreement.”

This is called Force Majeure Clause that enables the lender to undertake appropriate adjustments in the interest rates on home loans they approve to their borrowers.

So remember to look at refinancing every couple of years so that you do not pay too much. If you select a good housing loan company you can save a lot of money over the life of your housing loan and in almost all cases the consulting cost is free.

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