As moms, we tend to do our planning at the beginning of the year all by ourselves, right?  We jot down our daily or monthly things to accomplish for the household, for the kids, for the whole family.  We sometimes leave out our husbands because we think it’s not their thing to do the planning activity.  I’m guilty about this, and probably I may the only one among you reading this post, but good news!  I put an end to this solo activity last January 2, before going back to work.

I involved my husband finally!  But I conditioned him a week or 2 before our planning date night.  Let me tell you as early as now before spilling the juicy details, that it was an awesome experience!
How I planned the planning date night.

After receiving our bonuses, spending for Christmas gifts shopping, and listing down other expenses and 2017 receivables, I told him that it would be a good idea to list down everything together and plan our expenses for the year.  He would usually tell me, “Kaya mo na yan, you know my income, my expenses. Love you!”  Ok naman ang rejection kasi may I love you sa dulo.  But still, I had to find a way to make him cooperate, so I reminded him that Damien will turn 1 year old and Wes, 7 years old, milestones which we have to celebrate.  Celebration means a lot to him and that became a bait.  So ayun, he asked, “Sige, game, kelan?!”
2017 FAMILY PLANNING
Eto na!  Wait, let me clarify, we’re not planning for another baby anytime soon (waah! I’m not ready!)  Our planning date night was intended to meet the following objectives:

Financial:

• To check our Financial Health
• To plan how to make more money, save and invest

Marriage and Family:

• To make efforts to spice up marriage
• To be intentional in parenting our children
• To improve in areas of spiritual, health, and fitness

Let me share with you how we started.  First, order pizza and beer.  As most of our loko-loko friends say “Pag may alak, may balak!”  Yeah, may balak kami mag-planning talaga for 2017 and celebrate a milestone in our marriage because we’ve both matured to commit to our planning date night.

Second order of business, do the math.  The goal is to know if we’re living within our means or not and what miracle is happening that we’ve managed to survive our 2016 expenses.  Let me hare with you how to check your financial health.  The result that we all want is to know that we’re not deficit in terms of income vs. spending.  Thankfully, we’re okay.

FIRST STEP:  LIST DOWN INCOME AND EXPENSES

• Fixed Income less salary deductions (from SSS/Pag-Ibig/Philhealth/Withholding Tax)
• Income from bonuses or sidelines
• Fixed Monthly Expenses
• Discretionary Expenses
• Major Expenses 

SECOND STEP: COMPUTE
Next step is to identify your combined monthly cash flow and see if you're financially in the pink of health or if you're deficit.  Of course we want to see a healthy result and not otherwise.

Subtract your combined fixed monthly expenses and discretionary expenses from your fixed income.  What's the result?  Do you still have balance? Or is it negative?  If it's negative and you're wondering where you got the money to pay off your major expenses (school tuition fees, summer activity fees, travel expense, etc), take a look at your combined income from sidelines and bonuses.  Did they cover all these expenses?

STEP THREE: IDENTIFY IF YOU'RE LIVING WITHIN YOUR MEANS OR NOT
It's a good activity to see if you're living within your means, if you're spending less than you earn or otherwise, if you're spending too much on discretionary expenses, if you still have room for savings and investments, if you could still need to look for sidelines (should you happen to rely entirely on your fixed incomes) or if you're doing okay.  The activity will reveal a lot about your spending and saving characteristics and how you could improve in this area by working together.

After computing, we high-fived each other for working together as a good tandem in keeping the family financially stable.  We realized that where we spent too much and that we could have actually saved more, which we committed to do this year.

We also listed down our passions and talked about how we could monetize these (I'll talk about this on another post soon).  We listed our dreams to put up a business, diversifying investments and other extra money plans.  Our goal is to save and invest as much as we can, so it's really important to spend less than we earn.

PLANS FOR OURSELVES & THE FAMILY
Moving from the income and expense computation, the next steps in our date night were exciting.  We talked about the spiritual aspect of our family, marriage/relationship, sex and date nights, parenting our kids, dream travel destinations, health and fitness goals, and individual goals.

In this digital age, I still believe in the classic and effective practice of writing it down and making things happen.  Also to ensure that the date night planning didn't just happen like an event, we also wrote down our action plans, which we're both seriously committed to achieve

A WEEK AFTER...
After knowing the expense areas where we could save (food and gas), I've been bringing lunch and snacks baon to work.  We also made some adjustments to our routes so we could also save on gas.  We even started our daily expense sheet so we could monitor our expenses closely and know exactly where our hard-earned money goes to.  So far, it's doing us both really good because not only we save money on food, we eat more healthily because it's "lutong bahay" and we avoid food wastes at home.

On marriage and family matters, we've been more intentional to each other and in pareting our kids.  Quite surprisingly, he already asked me out on another date, watch a musical with him!  Kinilig ako slight! :)  So far so good and I hope we achieve all the goals we listed in the different areas of our lives.  It makes me extremely happy.

I highly recommend a husband-wife tandem on financial and family planning.  Two heads are better than one definitely.