Dental health is important for your overall well-being, but sometimes it can be expensive to keep your and your family’s dental health in shape. Fortunately, reducing dental costs for your family doesn’t have to be difficult. These tips below can help reduce the costs of your family’s dental care, so you can focus on achieving the best dental health possible.

1. Invest in Good Oral Hygiene at Home

Taking proper care of your teeth and gums can help you avoid costly dental procedures like fillings, crowns, and root canals. Regularly brushing your teeth twice a day and flossing once a day will help keep your teeth and gums healthy. If your children are old enough, make sure they do the same. You can teach them how to brush by making it fun. Cartoon characters are another great way to encourage children to brush their teeth.

2. Use the Free Checkups on Your Insurance

It’s important for people of all ages to get regular dental checkups every six months just like how you should visit a doctor at least once a year. Most insurance plans offer some type of free checkup or preventive care. Be sure to take advantage of this and visit your dentist for regular exams and cleanings, too.

You can also get free checkups if you’re a new dental patient. Most dentists are willing to give you a free consultation to encourage you to become a patient.

3. Avoid Keeping Sugary Drinks in the House

As much as sports drinks are harmful to your teeth, researchers found that exposure to energy drinks such as Rockstar, Monster, and Red Bull resulted in twice as much enamel loss as exposure to sports drinks such as Powerade, Gatorade, and Propel (3.1% to 1.5%). Sugary drinks are terrible for your teeth and should be avoided, or at least limited. That’s because sugar feeds the bacteria in plaque, which leads to tooth decay and cavities. Reduce or limit the number of sugary drinks that your family consumes to reduce costly dental issues later on.

4. Look for Affordable Payment Options

Some dental offices offer payment plans that can help your family afford the care they need. Ask your dentist about what plans are available or if there are any discounts for paying in full upfront. You can also talk to your insurance provider about what type of coverage is available for dental care.

Payment plans are common and can be a great way to spread the cost of dental care over time. If you’re not sure what options are available, ask your dentist or insurance provider for more information.

5. Shop Around for a Dentist

The cost of dental care can vary significantly from one dentist to the next. Shopping around can help you find a dentist that offers quality care at an affordable price. Ask friends and family for recommendations, or look online for reviews. Compare prices and services offered to find the best deal. Just make sure you’re not sacrificing the quality of care in order to save a few dollars.

Finding an affordable dentist is important because the cost of dental care can add up quickly if you don’t have insurance or a payment plan. Finding the right dentist can help you get the care your family needs without breaking the bank.

6. Talk to Your Dentist About Preventative Care

According to Colgate, there are four types of dental bridges: traditional fixed bridge, cantilever bridge, resin-bonded bridge, and implant-supported bridge. Depending on the type of bridge your dentist recommends, you can save money by opting for generic bridges instead of their branded counterparts. Ask your dentist about any generic alternatives that may be available.

Your dentist can also recommend preventative care treatments that can help reduce costly procedures later on. For example, tooth sealants can help protect your teeth from cavities and decay. These treatments are relatively inexpensive, but they can save you money in the long run.

It’s up to you to prepare your family for a better future and there are various ways you can invest in achieving your goals. You will probably be looking over your life, wondering how time flew fast, and regret if you don’t have a plan. Also, emergencies occur in life, so it’s best to stay prepared for your family’s future to be in safe hands. However, you can put yourself in a great position if you implement the following things most families forget to invest in and prepare for.

Family Ties

Besides building financial stability, investing in a family is an important goal everyone should implement. Having a happy family that relates peacefully with each other is a significant factor that many families lack. When a family is united, they are always there for each other, and their children acquire brilliant qualities from responsible families where they grow to be great men and women.

A united, loving family sticks together and cares for their elder ones, making them age gracefully. About 51% of care receivers reside in their own home, 29% live with family caregivers, and 4% live in assisted living facilities and convalescent homes. When a family is well invested, they find ways to take care of their own, according to research results shown above. Therefore, investing in your family should be a priority in every home.

Family Friends

While having a family may seem enough, spending quality time with family and friends is vital in several ways. Hanging out with family and friends affects your happiness and mental health. For instance, your family may be coping with stressful moments. When friends are around, you can be open and talk to them about the challenges you face. You can devise solutions for dealing with the issues and engage in fun activities to help you forget sad moments.

The grieved were inquired about how different death rituals helped with anguish. Up to 83% said family and friends assisted greatly, 60% said receiving consolation cards, and 54% said receiving flowers. As you invest in family friends, ensure you create healthy relationships that are long-lasting to avoid finding yourself in toxic friendships that can impact your family lifestyle.

Water Conservation

Water is among the resources you need to survive in life. Therefore, conserving water is essential to ensure that everyone gets adequate access. Investing in water-saving techniques can also save money that could be used in the treatment process, pumping, and heating. You can stop all the leaks by finding a professional to identify all the leaking parts in your home, like toilets, outdoor sprinkler systems, and treatment units. According to the Environmental protection Agency, an average family can waste about 180 gallons weekly or 9,400 gallons yearly from homestead leaks. That equals the water required to do more than 300 loads of laundry. Ensure you conserve water in the kitchen and bathrooms and keep the taps closed when not in use.

Financial Stability

Financial stability refers to a measure of all your valuable assets minus any debts and liabilities you possess. There are various reasons a family needs to build wealth and generate more. Some reasons include improved mental health and resilience when unexpected situations occur. After building financial stability, you can invest in various businesses to ensure positive cash flow that exceeds your regular value of expenses and savings that can be utilized in the future.

Health Insurance

Poor health can lead to premature deaths, and if you are passionate about your families, you need to invest in their health. Ensure your family eats healthy foods, enough exercise, and positive mental stimulation. Great health investment can enable you and your loved ones to work longer and minimize the expenses of personal insurance. If your family is not applied to the life insurance policies, ensure you find the right company offering better insurance deals to keep your family in a safer position.

You should start to plan your finances early so that as time passes, you will have a wide range of possible solutions to how to invest. Working with professionals can help you identify all the things you need to be prepared for and to invest in. Remember that consistency, hard work, and responsibility are ideas that can guide all your decisions.

I chatted a few weeks ago about needing to refocus on our financial goals. Sometimes the road to debt freedom isn’t straight. We have gotten off track and faced some setbacks with unexpected expenses, but we still make a little bit of progress every month.

However, we are both a bit tired of how slowly it has been progressing. Because of this, we’ve been looking for additional ways to make money to snowball our debt.

The Debt Snowball

If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you know all about the snowball method. Essentially, this method of paying off debt has you set aside an emergency fund. Once that is done, every extra penny you have goes to paying off your debts.

This involves having a set budget. Once you look at your budget and see how much excess money you have, you can see how much you can put towards your debts. It is important for people who are snowballing their debts to also budget for some entertainment. Not doing so typically leads to overspending or abandoning your budget altogether.

The debt snowball method oftentimes includes searching for additional work to throw at paying off accounts as well. For instance, if you can make a few extra bucks selling things in your attic or walking the neighborhood dogs, you’d use that cash to pay off debt. We’ve been looking for more ways to increase our income so that we can do this.

How We Are Hustling to Pay Off Debt

First, we have both been looking for ways to trim the costs of day-to-day life. This includes my husband coming home for lunch every day. This saves us between $25 and $50 per week, all of which goes toward paying off debts.

My husband has also been picking up small jobs to earn a little extra money on the side. For instance, someone in our building needed a battery put into their car. He went down on a Sunday. It took all of 10 minutes and he earned an extra $50 to go toward paying off his tool accounts.

I’ve also been picking up a little extra work here and there. Every once and a while a freelance article pops up and I take it. This usually only makes me between $25 and $100 per article, but every bit counts. I’ve also picked up a modeling side gig that pays $175 per photo. This is less consistent and doesn’t happen as often as freelance work, but it is still a great way to earn a little extra to put towards my student loans and other debts.

As the weather gets colder, we will also be cleaning out our closets. We will be trying to sell these items on Facebook Marketplace for extra cash to snowball our debts. All in all, each of these things seems very small but they are helping us tick down our overall debt tremendously.

Readers, have you picked up a side job or hustle to snowball your debt? What have you done? 

Read More

• When is Debt Settlement a Good Idea?
• October Update: Searching For Relief
• August Debt Update: Stalled
• Debt Update: June

If you were 100% debt free one year from now, what doors would that open up for you?

But what about if you were only 50% debt free?

That would still be pretty incredible!

Now’s the time to make this year the year that you take control of your money once and for all so that you can say “no” to debt and start saying “yes” to the life of your dreams.

I’m not talking about a resolution.

You know, those declarations where only 8% of people actually achieve success.

I’m talking about a new way of life.

A life where debt is no longer tolerated.

A life where you’re in control of your financial future and money is no longer a stressful subject.

The future is bright.

No matter how much debt you have now, and no matter how much (or how little) money you make, you CAN make progress to get out of debt.

To get started on the right foot so you can successfully tackle your debt, follow these steps:

Take a look back at the past year. If you’ve been keeping a budget or tracking your spending (and even if you haven’t), review how the past 12 months went. This is a good time to do an updated Net Worth Assessment.

How much debt did you pay off? Even if you didn’t pay much more than the minimum payments each month, if you have less debt at the end of the year than you did at the beginning, stand up and cheer! Be proud of yourself for not going deeper into debt!On the other hand, if you have more debt than you started the year off with, make a conscious effort to figure out why your debt balance increased.Were you not paying attention and got deeper into debt without realizing it, or was there a situation (or two) that surprised you that you don’t expect to come up again? Life happens so don’t be too hard on yourself. You really want to look at the year through an objective lens to figure out what lessons can be learned and how to avoid those situations in the future, if at all possible.

Remember, no judging, just adjusting where necessary. [bctt tweet=”No judging, just adjusting where necessary.”]

Did your assets (i.e. retirement account balances, savings account balances, home value, etc.) grow? The idea is that over time, we want our asset values to increase and our debt balances to decrease. This will improve our net worth and our financial health.

How much did you spend on average each month on groceries? Eating out? Utilities? Gas? Clothing? Etc? To figure this out for our household, I created a “Summary” tab in my budget spreadsheet that totals our spending in each category. It then divides the total by 12 so that I can easily see the monthly average we spent for the year. (You can easily do this with a pen, paper, and a calculator, though.) I like to analyze the averages for all categories, but you can start by reviewing the main categories that I listed above and any other pertinent categories for your household.

Determine what went well and areas that need improvement. What were the areas where you consistently went over budget? What areas did you consistently come in under budget? Begin to assess if you’ll need to adjust your budgeted amounts for these categories going forward. For example, as of December 28th, we averaged $601.82 for groceries per month, but we budgeted only $500 each month.Does this mean that we should increase our monthly grocery budget to $600 each month next year? Well, we still feel like keeping our grocery budget under $500 is a reasonable goal.

And here’s why:

I also reviewed the last six months (July through December) and found that on average we spent $464.55 per month! While there were a couple of months where we went over budget, we had four months in the last six months where we came in well under budget!

It might be worth doing some deeper analysis of your spending to determine if you should adjust your budgeted amounts up or down (or keep them the same).

Celebrate your achievements! For some, this will  be easy after going through the steps above. Others might have to work a little harder on this one. Even if you are having a tough year financially, come up with at least three things that are going well It could be as simple as lowering your cell phone bill or committing to buying things only when they’re on sale. I’ll bet that if you look hard enough, you can see that you made some positive changes for your financial future.

Use that momentum of feeling accomplished to fuel you to create your plan for the next year.

Determine new budget amounts for gifts, clothes, food, saving, etc. Create your Gifts Budget and determine your Budget Busters.Then break down these amounts into monthly amounts that you can include in your monthly budget. Take a look at your updated Net Worth Assessment and update your Debt Snowball.

Write down your SMART goals for 2016.How much debt do you want to pay off in the next 12 months?You can determine this by deciding how many debts you want to pay off this year (e.g. 3 credit cards), or you can come up with a percentage of debt you want to get rid of (e.g. 50% of my non-mortgage debt), or a nice round number (e.g. $20,000).However you come up with your amount, make sure you write it down (including the amount down to the penny) and add a deadline (e.g. December 31).And don’t forget to include WHY reaching this goal is important to you! Having a strong reason why is vital to success.Or if getting out of debt isn’t your goal, how much money do you want to save in 2016?

Break them down into shorter-term goals, e.g. quarterly, monthly, pay period. Let’s say you want to pay off $20,000 of debt. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a huge amount to me.But I also think it is completely doable.Split up the amount so you know how much you need to pay off each quarter, month, or pay period to meet your goal.So $20,000 in one year is $5,000 each quarter or $1,666.67 per month.Maybe that amount fits nicely in your budget, and you’ll be off and running knowing you can easily meet your goal.But what if it doesn’t?

When you create your goals, push yourself a little outside your comfort zone. Shoot for a little more than what you think you can actually accomplish.

In 2015, our financial goals totaled $41,469.33!

That breaks down to $3,455.78 per month! And that amount did NOT fit nicely into our budget by any means.

But we knew we had to make great strides in 2015 if we want to be completely debt free (mortgage and everything) by 2021. And we definitely do!

So we pushed forward, got creative, and if you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know that, we were able to surpass those goals!

Even if you can’t see at all how you’re going to achieve your goal, I still want it to make you uncomfortable. Great things happen when we get outside our comfort zones!

And you may just surprise yourself!

Create your January budget.Determine how you’ll be budgeting — pen and paper, an app like Personal Capital, or a spreadsheet.  I made it easy for you to get started with my Monthly Budget template. There’s a separate tab for each month, and it will do all of the math for you. Enter your expected income for the month of January.Enter your monthly budgeted amounts.

Use the analysis from your 12 months of spending from Step 1 and the monthly amounts you came up with from your Gifts Budget and Budget Busters exercises from Step 2.

Next, fill in your other expected budgeted amounts, and then determine how much extra you’ll be paying toward your smallest debt on your debt snowball (or how much you’ll be saving each month if that’s your goal).

Set up your daily and/or weekly habits to keep yourself on track. How many times each week will you update your budget? (I like to do it twice a week — usually Mondays and Fridays.)Schedule when you’ll update your budget on your calendar. If you see it as an appointment with yourself, you’ll be more likely to do it. If you don’t have an accountability partner, find one.

Determine what you will do when you get off track — because you will! We’ve been on our debt freedom plan for more than two years now, and we’ve never had a perfect month! But we have paid off more than $120,000 of debt on a single, middle-class income. Our progress has come in waves, and we seem to get off track at least a couple of times each year. But each time it happens, we remember why we’re working so hard to get out of debt, re-commit to our goal, and then resume our focus on keeping our spending low and boosting our income so that we can pay off more debt.I’ll be sharing more next week on how to get back on track when you get off course so stay tuned!

Plan how you’ll celebrate when you reach each shorter-term goal from Step 2. For each of your shorter-term goals come up with a way that you’ll reward yourself when you reach each milestone. Maybe you and your partner will share a bottle of wine and indulge in a fancy dessert. Maybe you’ll sign up for that half-marathon you want to participate in next summer. Maybe you’ll get yourself a long-awaited manicure and pedicure. (Maybe these are all ways I plan to reward myself when we meet our goals. 🙂 Just sayin’.) Shooting for the shorter-term goals may be incentive enough to achieve them, but sometimes we need a little extra push to stay on track.

You can tackle your debts!

It will take work, but with a little-advanced preparation, you’ll increase your chances of achieving your goals.

Now I’d love to hear about you!

What are your financial goals? How are you setting yourself up for success? Please share in the comments below.

Have you been feeling overwhelmed and down-right stressed out about your finances recently? We’ve all been there (at least I know I have). Thankfully, there are plenty of tools and ideas out there to help you cope with financial stress.

After dealing with some significant financial problems myself, including being homeless, I found that there are a few sure-fire ways to make yourself feel better about your finances while working to better them as well.

Set a budget.

If you’re going to handle your financial stress you won’t do it by simply being overwhelmed by it. You’ll need to take action and start putting a plan in place. First, you’ll want to track all of your day-to-day spending. After you’ve had a good look at all of your finances, you’ll have a good idea of where you can cut and what remains a necessity.

Then you’ll be ready to create a budget.  No one’s budget is the same, so be sure that your budget is tailored to your specific goals. Also be sure that you are creating a realistic budget. Many people are eager to start saving and get their finances on track that they don’t think everything through before making ambitious goals.

Emergency fund.

When you are setting up your budget, be sure you set aside money for savings. A majority of Americans don’t have the money set aside to cover a $1,000 emergency. Because that’s the case, many people wind up racking up credit card debt when emergencies come up. This will not help your financial stress. The additional monthly payments will only add to your stress. So, make saving money for emergencies a priority.

Get help.

Don’t be afraid to admit when you need help. What keeps many people stressed out about finances is not talking to others about their problems. In many cases, keeping the struggle you’re having to yourself will increase your anxiety about the issue. There are plenty of affordable financial advisors (and even free financial advisors) that can help you sort through your finances.

Make changes.

Nothing will happen to alleviate your financial stress unless you make a change. You can plan, budget, and track all day long but if you do not change your behavior, your financial situation will remain the same. If your finances have declined because you spend too much money going out to eat, but you don’t change that behavior, you will still be struggling at the end of the day.

Give yourself positive affirmation.

Last, but not least, give yourself positive affirmation. This is important when you are trying to reach financial goals and other goals in life. No one is perfect. You’ll have good and bad days with your finances. Be sure to remind yourself that nothing is permanent. You can always make more changes to better your situation.

If you keep these five things in mind, you’ll be able to keep your financial stress under control and you’ll be on the road to financial wellness in no time.

Have you been under financial stress? How did you handle it?