The author and her mother in Montserrat, Spain.
(Image credit: Alexandra Svokos)
Like many moms, my mother has always been our family’s CFO. I grew up watching her fill in Quicken workbooks, write and document checks and keep us all accountable for our own spending.
As an adult, I recognize now how valuable it was for my sisters and me to watch our mother manage money. It’s only in more recent history that it’s become socially acceptable for women to manage finances, even within the family, and many women have become financially disadvantaged because a husband mismanaged funds and kept them in the dark.
It was especially valuable watching her because she had good wisdom and tools to impart. As we celebrate Mother’s Day, I’m sharing some of the key money lessons I learned from her.
Sign up for Kiplinger’s Free Newsletters
Profit and prosper with the best of expert advice on investing, taxes, retirement, personal finance and more – straight to your e-mail.
Profit and prosper with the best of expert advice – straight to your e-mail.
1. Balance your own books
I’m not exaggerating that some of my oldest memories are of my mother tapping away at a big desktop computer, filling in spreadsheets. She wasn’t formally an accountant, but she acted like one for our family, making sure that our spending didn’t exceed what was coming in and that she had an eye on where every dollar was going.
There’s a reason why most financial advice starts with “track your spending.” You can’t know how to trim your budget if you don’t know what makes up your budget. On a broad level, “balancing your own budget” means you can understand it better and thus manage it better.
On a more minute, practical level, it also means that your money is literally in the right place. You avoid overdrawing an account, for example, if you know that a bill is coming up on a certain date to be drawn from a certain checking account, so you know to hold cash there. As another example, you might see that you’re holding more cash than you need, so you can set some aside for investing.
2. Keep your files organized
But all that tracking and monitoring can be rendered useless if your files are not organized. As I was growing up, my mother was meticulous about her filing. She always had folders on hand to add to her filing cabinets so she could easily find whatever document she needed when it became relevant.
There’s a mix of files you need to keep organized. There are financial documents like bank statements, investment records including savings bonds (especially from the pre-digital-age), and tax records you need to keep. There are practical items like house deeds, car registrations and insurance agreements. Then there are the family documents: Birth and death certificates, Social Security cards, and health records, especially as you get older or face a serious illness.
Each of these can and should be stored differently. Some are better kept in a home safe and some things can be kept in a safe deposit box, while others can fairly safely be in a filing cabinet, and still others, like certain estate planning documents, should be kept in an accessible space in case of emergency. The point is, you do have to do the work of organizing your documents, and I’m frequently grateful my mother did.
Read more: How to Store Your Financial Documents the Right Way
3. Look at multiple options, and negotiate where you can
My mother is the daughter of a contractor, and as such, she’s comfortable talking to contractors and other home professionals. I regularly watched her ask questions and press for information, both to make sure she understood what they proposed and to ensure she was paying an appropriate price.
From that, I learned that it’s not impolite to ask: Ask for clarification, for discounts with certain concessions (like making a lump-sum payment or putting off a project till a less busy season), for second and third opinions to compare pricing. As she tells my sisters and me, the worst thing someone can do if you ask for something is say “no,” which isn’t that harsh an outcome.
Since I became a homeowner, I’ve been working on channeling her voice, recognizing that I don’t have to accept every contractor proposal and that, sometimes, there is room for negotiation.
4. Stay informed and up-to-date on the financial landscape
The author and her parents at Denali Base Camp in Alaska.
(Image credit: Alexandra Svokos)
The way my mom operates, you’d think she was a Kiplinger editor (and not just a longtime reader). She is constantly reading up on tools and trends, making sure she’s making the smartest possible money decisions — and recognizing you need to adapt.
Some examples:
- She bought one of the first hybrid car models to hit the market while the wider world was still questioning the concept. That trusty Prius stayed in the family a good 15 years and saved us a ridiculous amount on gas.
- She downloaded the Robinhood app before I did because she was so curious about how it worked.
- When I-bonds were having a heyday in the wake of the pandemic, she invested in them and urged her daughters to do the same.
- And my ego is still recovering from her telling me how much better a rate she was getting in a money market account she’d found than I was getting in my high-yield savings account last fall.
Now, this doesn’t mean changing your financial strategy every week, it just means staying aware of what’s out there and how it could improve your finances.
5. Empower yourself to manage your finances
I’m grateful to my mother for these and many other lessons I’ve learned from her. It’s very possible she was faking it till she made it and learning along the way, but what I saw was a confidence in managing money. She didn’t shy away from making decisions, and she educated herself to take care of our family finances.
From that, I understood that I could do the same. It’s easy to let someone else take the wheel of your money and to assume finance is too complicated and let your cash languish in a basic checking account. But thanks to her, I grew up feeling empowered to direct my financial destiny, and I’m sure there are many other people out there feeling the same about their moms.
