How to plan your finances for holiday expenses

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Transcription

Interviewer: It’s Your Family’s Number One, it’s 96.5 and it is that time of the evening, yes we catch up with our lovely finance expert, Helen Baker from Own Your Own Two Feet. Hello, Helen.

Helen: Hello, how are you doing today?

Interviewer: Good, thank you, now we’re going to jump straight into it, school holidays are fast approaching. We all think, oh we need a holiday, oh we need to get a break, but money is always tight. What are your tips?

Helen: Okay, so this is where we really need to realize we definitely need holiday. Everyone burns out and it’s really good having quality time with your family so, depending on what you do, you may have holidays every Easter, school holidays, Christmas holidays, and so planning ahead for them just like how we take care of bills is really important.

So if you ahead and think, okay, over the next year, what sort of holidays are we going to have or how many will we have, you might not know exactly where you’re going to go, but you can start to plan, that we might have a camping trip here. We might be doing a bigger holiday over there. We might just go and stay with friends.

There are so many different things that you can do and at the end of the day, it’s all about having quality time and having family time. So the things to avoid is ramping up those credit cards with those expenses, because long after the holiday is over, you still are paying those off, and you have a 20% interest on those credit cards, so that is not really good fun.

The other thing to do is try to avoid using the money you would have paid on your home loan, what we call is the equity in your home and pulling it back. It’s a little bit like using your home loan as an ATM. And we don’t really want to do that because we are trying to pay off that home loan debt as soon as we can. So what we need to do is plan for it, we need to put the money aside every—whether you get paid weekly, a fortnight or monthly, work out what it’s going to be for the year. Divide it by how many times you get paid and put that money in a separate account so you can see it grow. And then get the kiddies to put some pocket money away because it teaches them how to manage money for them to spend it when it comes around the holiday time as well.

Interviewer: I love that, that even that whole sort of jar on the fridge.

Helen: That’s a good one.

Interviewer: Put the coins in and the kids get to see it and they take the value of money a bit more really, don’t they?

Helen: Yes, and then have the fun of doing—deciding what they want to spend it on because they get so many opportunities when they are on holidays, and it’s about to really make decisions that it’s really good all around.

Interviewer: And we definitely need those holidays, and would you be right in agreeing with me, Helen, that sometimes it doesn’t have to be a big holiday, it’s just quality time with the family. We don’t need all whistles, all sing, all dancing, we just need some break together.

Helen: Yeah, and the luxury that we have is the family fun things to do that are actually free, because if we do them all together, that’s what makes it fun. Doing it with your friends, with your family, with your cousins, whatever and just have a really good time. If you ask the people our age, what was the best time a lot of people would just say going camping, which is, you know real cheap and you just take with you the same things you would spend at home anyway and you go exploring, you might see whales, you might see eagles. You could see anything, it’s fantastic.

Interviewer: Well thank you for your top tips. I’m sure we’ll all be planning what we’re going to do with the school holidays and thanks for joining us this evening. I look forward to chatting with you again.

Helen: You too, take care, bye!

Interviewer: If you want to find out more about our lovely Helen who joins us, OnYourOwnTwoFeet.com.au. That’s right, wasn’t it?

Helen: Yep, all good.

Interviewer: Great. That was perfect.