How to Get Back Home
Preparing yourself and your family financially
By Mrs. Wanda Jefferson
May 29, 2004 - 3:36:00 PM

A Titus 2 woman is described in the Bible as being a wise financial manager, and I firmly believe that the careful management of household finances under the direction of a husband’s leadership is essential. Unless you are blessed with an unexpected windfall, or already have an established source of independent income, we will assume that your retirement from the workforce will probably mean a drop in your family income. If you’ve been a double-income family for quite some time, it can come as quite a shock, especially if your spending habits do not change. The preparation period allows you to both change your spending habits to those of a single-income family, and ideally to build savings to cushion the transition.

How much do you really spend?

A family considering the switch to a single income should first try to grasp how much they spend every month. The simplest way to do this is to save receipts from every purchase, bills, and other paperwork and track your expenditures vs. your income in a notebook or ledger of some type. Without this basic knowledge, it is almost impossible to know how much you spend, and for what, so that you can make a budget. In our family, I am in charge of the "record keeping"--I save our receipts and bills for each week in a coffee can, and enter them in simple notebooks by category whenever the basket gets full (usually about once a week.) I record daily totals for food, daily necessities, eating out, gas, pocket money, medical expenses, and entertainment, and monthly expenses like house payments, car payments, credit card bills, gas, electricity, water, phone bills, and others. Be sure and write down any debit or credit card purchases too. It’s hard to do this at first, but once you get in the habit, it becomes very simple and very enlightening. Learning, for example, that I spend an overage of $70 eating out every week is incentive enough to come home so we can cook more! Compare your expenditures to your income? Are you losing money every month just through your spending habits alone?

How much do you owe?

After you have a basic grasp of your monthly expenses, move on to an audit of your financial situation. How much debt, really, do you have? Include your credit cards, housing loan, car loan, and student loans in the count. What are your assets? How much savings do you have? Do you have any investments, a 401K, a rental property, or other assets? Compare you total assets and liabilities (debts). How far in the red (or in the black) are you? Knowing this information, while not pleasant, is vital for planning a successful return home.

Live on one income before you quit

With your newfound financial knowledge, you are now ready to start taking an honest look at how you can come home, full-time. Not whether or not you can, but how you can. You might have to make some cuts in what you consider to be necessities, or readjust your expectations regarding what kind of lifestyle you want to lead. Take a look at your monthly list of expenditures, and start marking out what you don’t need. Pare your spending plan down to the real essentials: tithing, housing, food, transportation, and medical care. Anything else is negotiable. Then, start living your new budget, before you quit your job.

Why should one live on less than they earn? The important point here is to both learn to live on a lower budget before you actually have to, and to free up that extra income for savings, debt-repayment, and building your contingency fund (money held separately from your savings for unbudgeted expenses, car repairs, or other emergencies). One wise piece of advice is for newly-married couples manage their spending so they only live on the husband’s income, while the wife’s income is put towards savings. Even if you haven’t been doing this already, there is no time like the present to learn to live on one income. It will make your "homecoming" much easier.