💡 How do you extract unnecessary expenses (things you don't really need) from your budget?
To extract the unnecessary things from our money, we first need to understand what we're paying for and what we're spending the money we received on.
How can we do that and choose what's more important for us to spend on and what's less important?
First, what we need to do is think about what we're spending our money on.
Make ourselves a list, or even just think about what things we buy and where we buy them.
And also try to think about what we would like to have that our parents maybe don't agree we can buy right now,
or that they encourage us to save our pocket money for instead.
To save = to put money aside a little at a time, so that we have enough to buy the gift we wanted (see card no. 1 - Segmentation - where we divide the money we received into parts to reach our goal).
For example:
After preschool we buy an ice pop / candy / snack at the neighborhood store every day.
Once a week we go with our parents to buy a surprise / a game at the toy store.
When we spend our pocket money (our money) on sweets or small surprises every time,
we actually miss out on the chance to buy something bigger that costs more, that our parents don't agree to right now for all kinds of reasons.
If we do this exercise, and instead of spending money at the store every day to buy an ice pop or candy, we give up the ice pop every other day, we can take out that expense and put it aside.
The more expenses we cut that we don't really have to make every day, the sooner we'll reach the goal we set for ourselves of buying the bigger game.
← Less candy = more money for dreams 🎯
Ready for a challenge? We've prepared some extra challenges for you to tryNow it's your turn to invent. If you invented a magic tool that extracts exactly the thing that's bothering you from any situation, from your plate, from your day, from the game, what would this tool look like, and what name would you give it?
Easy1. Search the clothes closet together for one item you could remove an unnecessary part from, a loose button or a scratchy tag, to make it more comfortable to wear.
2. Ask your child: is there a moment in the day where you'd want to take out just one thing? What would it be?
A bit of a stretch3. Choose a meal or a weekly activity together and try to remove one non-essential part of it, and see if it's still good without it.
4. After a week of tracking expenses, check together which small expense you managed to extract from the budget, and how much money that saved.
Challenge for champions5. Ask your child to design a new game that starts from an existing game after removing one rule or one part from it.
6. Try together to think of a familiar product, for example headphones, a bag, or an item of clothing, and imagine a version of it without one specific part, and discuss whether it would be better or worse.