Are You Ready For Your Future? Mint’s Personal Finance Blogger Roundup

photo: AMagill

As we go through various stages in our lives, one question persists: are we well prepared for the future?

Becoming a spouse and a parent are two of the major roles that most are looking forward to experiencing. But are we mentally, emotionally and even financially prepared for each role?

Are your finances ready for the rigors of family life? How are you moving forward with your finances and work? Our latest roundup of personal finance blogs from around the Web touches upon some of the issues we may face when we begin building and organizing our family and work lives.

Planning Your Finances With Your Partner

Always the Planner weighs the pros and cons of keeping a couple’s finances separate versus pooling them together. How do you approach handling your family budget? This article may offer you insights on this matter.

A Gai Shan Life shows one of the advantages of having joint finances and a financial reservoir: the ability to support a partner who is going through major life changes or challenges. Relationships entail selflessness. If you’re willing to do many things in the name of love, perhaps you’ll be willing to consider sharing your finances with your partner as well.

Planning Your Finances As You Raise A Family

The Simple Dollar exposes the many responsibilities involved with raising kids. While our kids are precious and wonderful, growing a family will have an impact on our finances — typically to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars to raise a child to adulthood. Are you prepared for it? Are you ready to make concessions and compromises to support your family’s needs? The Simple Dollar’s advice gives us a lot of food for thought on the subject of children and family.

Being Frugal shares how to organize one’s kitchen to make things accessible and available for everyone in the household to use. Keeping the most important room in the home clean, well stocked and well organized makes it easier for you to present your family with healthy, delicious meals. An organized kitchen should add sanity to your household no matter how busy it can get.

Planning Your Day-To-Day Expenses

Saving Money Today talks about how to keep your bills organized and how to get your overall budget in order. If you’ve got a good system in place for filing away your bills, it’ll make it easier for you to manage and pay off your obligations. Doing so will help you avoid those situations where you misplace receipts or miss a payment deadline because of lost documents.

Canadian Finance Blog discusses how to develop a budget for your fuel requirements. Having a gas budget helps you reel in your spending on fuel. While gas is a crucial commodity, you should still watch your spending on travel.

Planning To Grow Your Net Worth

The Financial Blogger shows us some of the biggest hindrances to dealing with an alternative income source: a side business. Taking these points into consideration may save a dying business, help you streamline one that’s already working well or help you get your new small business successfully off the ground. Just like raising a family, developing a business takes a huge chunk of your time and other resources, especially your finances. Create the perfectly streamlined business by using the principles mentioned in this article.

While family life can be challenging, if we plan for the future, responsibilities can be a lot easier to handle.

Silicon Valley Blogger (SVB) runs The Digerati Life and The Smarter Wallet, where she writes about  general personal finance topics such as investing, budgeting, debt management and small business ideas.