Accounting for the Family CFO

Managing family finances can be just as big a job as doing the same for a small business, and it’s complicated by personal relationships (spouse, children, other relatives). In fact, successful business owners might find dealing with personal finances to be more daunting than daily business operations.

As your family’s CFO, your responsibilities cover these main areas: financial planning, managing assets and liabilities, and, possibly the most difficult, managing financial behavior. Under these umbrellas fall the tougher questions and issues of shared personal finances including:

• Buying a home and dealing with the accompanying loan process.
• Managing existing personal debt, such as educational loans and credit cards.
• Determining your career path and how it relates to your family’s financial goals and future.
• Deciding whether or not to have children and the resulting fiscal impact (child rearing, college expenses, etc).
• Developing a retirement plan and strategy.
• Anticipating financial emergencies and building and maintaining the funds necessary to cover them.
• Purchasing insurance, medical and otherwise.

Obviously, this runs much deeper than balancing a check book and reconciling a bank statement every month. And as your family grows, the accounting only becomes more complicated. It can seem like a full-time job.

That’s why outsourcing the family accounting can be a smart tactic. While, for a nominal fee, an accounting service keeps track of the books, you can concentrate on the big picture issues like planning for retirement and budgeting. The spreadsheets are left to certified public accountants, and not your Saturday afternoon.