Savings Guide – Daily Saving Money Tips

My younger brother, a keen saver from the times of infancy, sat in dismay at about eight years of age at the thought that all my parents would leave us would be their debt. He may not be far wrong, and according to an article by Ian Cowrie in the UK Telegraph, we wouldn’t be alone in that. Two thirds of adults expect to inherit money, while half of those aged over 50 are already spending the money they would have thought to have left their children.

Those lucky Baby Boomers. With aging parents and adult children still living at home, they are literally being sandwiched without much space left in the middle for their own concerns. While a crucial contribution and one you would never give up, if this applies to you, in all likelihood, your finances, time resources and brain space will be stretched. Here are some coping strategies, both financial and otherwise

Anyone familiar with the West Wing knows all about the R-word. It doesn’t matter how close you are to it, how long you’ve been in it, or how afraid you are of it, saying ‘recession’ out loud is akin to saying ‘Macbeth’ in a theatre. But, as Ross Gittins pointed it out in the weekend Sydney Morning Herald, here in Oz we have a pretty sound economy. So why is the R-word on everyone’s lips and is it time we just stopped saying it altogether?

The ups and downs of world finances are really not something I’ve ever really known. I’m too young to remember a recession, and not worldly enough to have seen the effects of recent years on Greece and Portugal and even the United States. So with the flux of economies, I thought I’d do a bit of research on how best to ride out the storms as well as the sunny days.

The way we treat our finances is often emotional. I think a lot of people would agree with that- we can spend a lot of money because we’re feeling happy (celebration) or miserable (retail therapy). Behavioural economics says basically that, except also frames worldwide economies in a similar way. So what could that mean for our finances?

For Friday, an article on how to get some peace into your finances. As with most things, if you can set up the right factors, good things tend to flow out of them. Not all the time, life has a capacity to be capricious now and then. But here are some things you can change in your financial life to make everything come just that little bit easier.