Fall Family Finance Check-In
Top 20 things to know before owning a home; back to school budgeting 101; frugal family budgeting.
What’s New This Week 🤑
Top 20 Things to Know Before Owning a Home: Buying a house for the first time can be overwhelming, so our team has compiled the top 20 things to introduce yourself to before closing on a first purchase.
Back-to-School Budgeting 101 - Practical Money-Saving Tips for Parents: This guide provides practical, money-saving tips for parents of all school-age children to tackle back-to-school expenses with confidence. We cover budgeting strategies, timing your purchases, taking advantage of sales, using coupons and rewards, buying secondhand, and knowing where to find the best back-to-school deals.
Frugal Family Budgeting - Year-Round Money-Saving Tips for Every Parent: We’re sharing everyday saving tips and long-term planning advice to help your family stay financially healthy now and all year round!
Taipei Summer Camp: Eye on Nature (eye上大自然): Can a short-term camp in Taipei meaningfully improve a child's Mandarin? Is it worth the investment for your family? I find out!
What We’re Reading This Week 📖
Blockbuster, board games and boredom - why everyone’s parenting like it’s 1999: We’ve been seeing a lot of thoughts lately about parenting styles and the resurgence of “old fashioned” techniques. Now, millennial parents turning to 90s-style parenting as a form of strategic nostalgia. Inspired by their own childhoods, trends like board game nights, analog entertainment, and old-school creativity are resurging to counteract modern overstimulation. The Guardian explores how blending emotional awareness with retro simplicity is becoming a parenting choice.
TikTok is reinventing 2004 Facebook for college students: In another throwback, TikTok’s new feature, Campus Verification, will let college students confirm their enrollment, connect with classmates, and turn TikTok into a hub for real-world connections and belonging on campus.
Meet the Parents Raising ‘Carnivore Babies’: A controversial trend that is niche but gaining traction swaps pureed fruits and yogurt for bone broth, sardines and ribeye. Advocates say it’s a practice that has been used for centuries, while other experts caution the high-inflammation diet can result in heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity. (WSJ, Podcast)
How We’re Feeling This Week:
Like a vacation sandwich: one week of a return back to “normal” after our Asia trip and before our annual end-of-summer getaway with my husband’s boys. Divorced families can look very different. For us, it means designated holidays and vacation weeks that cannot be combined with other family trips on the dad’s side. One result of this, good or bad — a lot of vacations!
Good luck to all those parents and kids who are about to start back up at school!
Cheers,
Your Team at MomBrains