Budgeting for a Family of Seven in 2022: Tips and Tricks

Do you have a large family? Are you looking for tips on budgeting for a family of seven in 2022?

As you can imagine, supporting a large family is no small feat. With our five kids, keeping food on the table, clothes on their backs, and a roof over their heads doesn’t necessarily require a six figure income.

A strict adherence to a solid budget goes a long way in providing for our family’s needs and wants.

According to Debt.com’s 2021 survey of over 1,000 participants, a whopping 80% claim to budget.

This percentage has grown significantly in the last several years. More people are noticing the importance of living within their means and building up their savings.

Here are a few tips to help you create and get the most out of your budget!

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How to Budget for a Family

Although establishing a budget is important before starting a family, it is even more necessary while raising kids.

Making a budget might sound intimidating, but it is actually quite simple. The most difficult part is sticking to it.

After it’s made, you’ll just regularly review and adjust it as your finances shift.

To begin the process, my husband and I have our (we have joint accounts) online banking app open and ready to review.

In addition, we have all payroll paychecks or the online payroll site available for reference as well. These are the starting points for creating a budget.

Now, the majority of people like to use good old fashioned, pen and paper to create their budgets, while a small group of people prefer a spreadsheet such as Excel.

Whichever method you choose, gather your materials.

Next you’ll have to decide on the time length of your budget. If you get paid weekly, you might find it easiest to divide your paycheck on a weekly basis.

With our main paycheck coming in every two weeks, my husband and I prefer to budget on a two week budget system. This is the method I’ll be demonstrating in this article.

Step-by-Step: How to Budget for a Family of Seven in 2022

We will break down everything to keep it simple and straightforward.

For a categorized budget, the Federal Trade Commission has a free family budgeting worksheet you can use as a visual for where everything should be tracked.

What we do to start our budget worksheet is write the total amount of incoming money at the top of our page. This should match the total amount of all money in all checking accounts or pay apps (PayPal, Venmo, etc.) combined.
The following step is to write down all bills that are the same amount at every interval. For example our trash pickup is $75 every quarter, so we set aside $25 every month or $12.50 out of every paycheck to cover that bill. Our car insurance is a set amount every month so we split the cost in two and set aside that amount from each paycheck to cover that bill. These expenses will be constant and only need readjusting maybe once a year if they change.
Next, the fluctuating bills will need to be recorded on your paper. This includes things such as electric and water bills. When we budget for electricity every month, we take the highest bill from the year and use that. Most months are lower but there are peak months such as January and July where most households will use more electricity depending on weather. After paying the electric bill each month, we tend to have a little extra to put into savings for the time when an electrical component may need replacing.
Finally, the hardest part of making a budget is perhaps the grocery bill. With seven people eating three full meals and two snacks a day, we’ve had to get creative and resourceful with groceries to stay within our food budget. Essentially, you will need to take the average of several of your past grocery bills and use that as your dollar amount.

When budgeting for travel, special occasions, or large home improvements, we plan roughly a year in advance to give ourselves plenty of time to save.

Sites such as Pinterest have a free printable family budget worksheet you can download to help you track your spending and savings.

Check out our Monthly Budget Planner on Amazon!

Tips For Sticking to a Budget

Once you’ve made a budget within your means, it is only successful if you stick to it. If you’re a disciplined person, budgeting for a family of seven in 2022 won’t be difficult.

If you tend to be a little more lax about finances, it will prove to be tough but only until you get the hang of it.

As I mentioned before, the grocery bill can be a tough place to budget so we’ll use this category as our example for budgeting tips for families.

Here are a few ways we keep the grocery bill in check:

Use coupons (both physical and electronic) from both your local grocery store and online coupon sites.
Enroll in your local grocery stores’ rewards programs. Some stores (Harris Teeter) will send personalized savings every week to you through the rewards program. Others have incentive programs such as the Shop and Earn program at Food Lion.
Although I don’t like having a bunch of apps on my phone, I do use the grocery apps when making my grocery list. They are a quick reference to their flyers that host weekly savings. Shopping the sales is a huge savings so long as you don’t waste gas money to do it.
Make a protein (such as chicken or beef) stretch across two meals. My favorite for this is a whole roaster chicken. We will eat most of the chicken with rice and a veggie one night and then I use the bones to make broth and use any leftover meat and veggies and rice to make soup for the following night. Even if there are no other leftovers, I can store the broth for another meal.
Purchase products that have multiple uses. Fajita wraps are a versatile item to buy. You can use them for fajitas, tacos, quesadillas (use that leftover chicken), or deli wraps.

These are just a few ways to work within a grocery budget, however you can apply some of these tips to other categories in your budget as well.