Dad bloggers

Budgeting Your Money In Hard Times

April 2, 2023

We are currently living in very difficult times and there is no doubt that the last few years have been very hard, financially and emotionally. We have seen many changes in our lives that only five years ago we wouldn’t have thought possible.

It now seems in the distant past that the world was struck with a global pandemic. The whole world was shut down, air travel came to a complete halt and countries all over the world had very strict lockdowns in place that curtailed our lives. This is something that nobody living today would ever have experienced before. It was without question very tough and put huge strains on families. Thankfully we came out the other side and managed to get back to a more normal life.

As the pandemic was ending, unfortunately we then entered a cost of living crisis. This saw interest rates and inflation start to rise at a very alarming rate and this was something we hadn’t seen for decades.

The cost living of living crisis affected everybody including us and in particular our mortgage. We’re coming to the end of a fixed-rate mortgage and with interest rates on the rise, we knew we would be facing higher repayments.

This is where a mortgage calculator is a very good tool to work out exactly what your repayments will be with a new interest rate.

We have to now also start budgeting a lot more tightly than we used to make sure our money is going further and when we buy anything we need to make sure that we are getting the best value for money.

This of course is never easy and sometimes a little help is needed to teach you new ways of doing things such as budgeting or even recycling.

I have been using a Mortgage Calculator website to help me learn more about budgeting and actually also to make sure I am recycling properly. The Mortgage Calculator has a vast amount of business sims games that you can play to help you with all the different aspects of your life and they are lots of fun to play.

The games that I particularly enjoyed playing were Cash Back, Wind and Solar and Twin the Bin. What I really like about the games were they were very simple to play and you can also play the games with your children so they learn about budgeting, recycling and many other topics.

Cash back is really simple. You are the cashier in the shop and you have to work out the change a customer receives after they have made their purchases. You do this by answering questions in the time allowed and the amount at the end has to match the answer. It’s a really simple idea but lots of fun.

Twin the Bin is a fantastic way to learn about recycling and can actually be played as a family. At the start of each round you’re told to collect certain items. This could be for instance plastic or cardboard. Then all you have to do is collect as many as you can in each round and if you get it right you score points and if you don’t, you lose points. My children really enjoyed this game.