We’re excited to be doing our fifth blog post! As a continuation of our last blog post, we’ve partnered with a financial advisor to help provide some additional tips on how single parents can deal with inflation.
Do you have any other advice on budgeting?
Although it may not seem intuitive, during inflationary times it makes sense to not hold off on major necessary purchases if possible because the prices of these products will likely increase if you wait. Also, for other goods you know you will use (things like toothpaste and toilet paper), try to buy those in bulk. If there’s someone you know with a Costco or BJ’s membership maybe you can shop with them to get the club bulk discounts they offer.
How should I think about saving and investing?
Try your best to keep saving and continuing to grow your savings/investments. There are some investments that can help mitigate the impact of inflation like certain inflation-protected treasury bonds. I-bonds, or high interest savings accounts.
What’s currently going on with interest rates?
In the past interest rates have gone up as inflation has increased. This means that variable rate interest on things like your mortgage, auto loan, or credit card will increase. If you can try to lower your amount of variable rate debt by paying down your credit card balance or consider refinancing to a fixed rate mortgage. On the flip side you should try to take advantage of high interest savings accounts so you can realize higher interest income.
Are there any ways I can offset the impact of inflation?
One of the potential offsets to inflation is that wages for a lot of folks have been on the rise. Try to ask your boss for a raise. There are tons of resources on the internet on how you can go about doing this, and since hiring has been tough employers are often willing to negotiate salaries. You can even argue that if your wages don’t rise in an inflationary environment that means that you’re basically taking a pay cut because your buying power has decreased.
We’d like to give a special thanks to the financial advisor for partnering with us on answering these questions. We’ll continue to do more posts to answer the personal finance questions of single parents. In the meantime, if you know any single parents who have any personal finance questions or are interested in receiving personal finance coaching, please have them shoot us an email at singleparentadvisorynetwork@gmail.com. Same goes to any financial advisors who may be interested in partnering with us.