Be Neat with Moneygment

One afternoon, I got a group chat request from Moneygment, asking me to be a speaker for an event designed for homemakers to learn more about the Moneygment app. I got excited for these homemakers, because knowing more about what Moneygment is will really help them become more efficient in their tasks.

The #BeNeatwithMoneygment event, organized by Teena Barretto, came into fruition on July 20.

My role then was to give a talk about organizing and homemaking. Because there are a lot of aspects in homemaking, I opted to discuss these two topics that will help our audience appreciate the Moneygment app better: Home Management, and Proper Filing System.

Home Management

Homemaking goes beyond the tasks that people actually see, such as organizing, cleaning, shopping for food, cooking, and doing the laundry. It requires huge commitment to streamline the behind the scenes to the actual work, because homemaking involves making wise and timely decisions for the entire household.

These decisions involve managing the members of the household, keeping a schedule and making sure everyone at home will be able to follow, and paying the bills – all at once, while making sure you don’t lose yourself in the process.

The question is, how does a homemaker actually accomplish all these when we only have 24 hours in a day? Here are some tips that I shared in my talk:

Know the members of your household. Who are the people who make your house a home? Aside from your immediate family, your household staff also ensures that the activities in your house are well attended even in your absence. Knowing them also means you understand their needs for nourishment and rest.
Identify the scope of your staff’s work. Giving your household staff specific tasks and responsibilities will make them efficient because they will be able to master your instructions in their particular assignments. Also, doing this will avoid conflict since you will give out small, bite-sized tasks rather than massive tasks for them to finish.
Pay their wages promptly and provide government issued benefits. Because they take care of our houses and our kids when we’re away, it’s just proper that we give them their wages or salaries on time. It is also important that we provide them government issued benefits such as SSS, PhilHealth, and Pag-Ibig so that they will have a source of money when the need arises.

Proper Filing

Here in the Philippines, most of our transactions, financial or otherwise, require a printed document – birth certificate, proof of employment, school documents, insurance policies, deposit slips, receipts, and the list goes on.

As homemakers, it is very important that we know how to properly safe keep our documents for travel, taxes, references, billings, and so on.

Whatever filing system you have at home is good enough, for as long as your papers are properly sorted (according to type, or date, or a combination of both – whichever works for you) and for as long as you place all these papers in a safe place where you can easily access them once you need them.

Knowing where these papers are at home will make it easy for a homemaker to file and pay for their taxes, bills, and premiums on time. As a homemaker, I cannot stress enough how being on time means not just in paying the bills: we need to get up on time to attend to the kids before they go to school, we need to go to work on time, to go home on time to attend to the kids at night, to make sure everyone eats and sleeps on time, to return the kids’ reply slips and letters to school on time… Doing all these requires efficiency on our part, and we are just so privileged to have technology that adapts to the needs of modern working professionals.

In our #BeNeatwithMoneygment event, my friend Jes Palmiano, owner of Togetech Inc., discussed how the Moneygment app helps us to avoid missing due dates in payments.

With this app, we can pay our taxes, bills, and government premiums all in the comfort of our homes. Moneygment allows us to attend to our kids or to our task for the day while attending to this all-important duty of paying the bills as a homemaker.

Read (link to Moneygment blog before)

It was a fruitful event because the audience were also given the chance to ask their questions and express their insights after the talks. I am very happy to have met a lot of homemakers who I only knew by their IG usernames!

Believe it or not, days after this event, I still kept looking back to this day. I had such a great time because I actually learned a lot as well. Aside from meeting people and taking home lessons in money management, we were all treated with a massage from Recovery Mode MNL, and loot bags from Kurin Water and Elephantique PH!