Unless you live alone, your financial picture includes other people. That’s why Brightside serves every adult member of your household—for free!
Our goal is always to get you to financial health, and there’s simply no doing that when other people’s financial lives are intertwined with yours. In the case of roommates, there might be shared expenses like rent and bills, while with spouses and partners, there can be shared or individual debts, obligations, assets, and plans to consider.
Our Brightside Financial Assistants have had a lot of success helping families and households with their finances—everything from helping a married couple pay down their debt to finding support for a significant other who’d lost their job. Along the way, we’ve learned a few things that are important for a successful household:
- Set and agree on your goals. The more aligned you are about your financial goals, the more likely you will be to meet them instead of being pulled in different directions. Your Brightside Financial Assistant can work with you and your household members to discover what’s important to each of you, help you set shared goals, address any knowledge gaps, and to learn how to compromise if things get off track.
- Coordinate bills and spending. You don’t need to combine finances but you should keep track of what you each spend and the bills you need to pay. Your Financial Assistant can help you set up a spending tracker for upcoming bills. And with Brightside’s Spending Snapshot, you can link your accounts and automatically track your spending each month.
- Choose someone to lead. It’s quite common for one member of a given household to manage the household budget. We’ll work with whoever heads up your household’s finances to develop a plan to reach your shared goals. And we can help you both get on the same page and be better prepared for when unexpected issues arise, like a sickness or a job loss.
- Don’t ignore individual needs. Everyone has needs, and you can’t just cut them off. But often what sidetracks a household’s finances is when one person spends on something unexpected, especially if they do so regularly. Make a list, prioritize the important items, and allocate some part of your budget to them so that you can intentionally support the things that you love to do without derailing the household’s finances. Your Brightside Financial Assistant can help you and your household members come up with an approach that’ll allow you to balance individual needs with your shared goals.
We know financial health means health for the entire household. Your Brightside FA is an impartial advisor who will listen to your circumstances, either individually or together, and help you come up with the best options. So please let every adult you live with know they can use Brightside, 100% confidentially and completely free of charge.
Brightside Client Story
Carmen came to Brightside with $3,000 in credit card debt, $80 in savings, and a credit score of 692. She wanted help sticking to a plan to save $6,000 to pay for her son’s immigration costs from Columbia. She reached out to her Bilingual Financial Assistant Gabe for a clear plan and some accountability.
How Brightside Helped
- Carmen’s Financial Assistant (FA) reviewed her cashflow and found that she could triple her weekly savings, with a path to save $1,100 by the end of the year.
- Together, they came up with a plan to use her stimulus check to pay off her credit card balance.
- Her FA also referred her to her workplace Employee Assistance Program (EAP) to work through depression and anxiety that she said were contributing to her spending habits.
- Carmen was also able to start contributing to her 401(k) so she could take advantage of her company match.
Soon, Carmen’s credit score was up to 755, and she was well on her way to her savings goal
Brightside members save $1,200 per year on average. Really! Talk to your Financial Assistant today to see what Brightside can do for you.
Just call 855-940-1507 to get started.
