onUp Movement: Smart Budgeting for Parents of Young Athletes

Disclosure:This post was sponsored, and paid for, by SunTrust. All opinions are my own.

onUp Movement: Smart Budgeting for Parents of Young Athletes

There is absolutely nothing as rewarding as watching your kids work hard for their dreams and achieve their goals. I love being my children’s biggest fan. If you are a sports parent like I am, then you well know not only the time commitment, but the financial commitment that comes along with the territory. Expenses can start to add up quickly and there have been many times when we over committed ourselves to sporting events before we added up the expense columns. Everything from gas and travel expense to entry fees, equipment, dues … the list goes on and on!

Youth activities are big business in America, and the cost of pursuing a child’s dream can add up quickly. According to a recent SunTrust survey, about 20 percent of parents spend more than $2,500 a year and almost 40 percent spend more than $1,000 annually on sports, dance, arts and other extracurricular activities.

Of course, sports have so many benefits and they can offer children a lifetime of important lessons. So while spendy, it’s completely worth it to watch your child make his first goal or hit her first free throw. Plus, if nothing else, they keep your kid active and busy and everyone knows that a busy kid has a lot less time to get into trouble. We are firm believers in the fact that coachable kids become employable people. Great lessons all around! Nonetheless, it can be stressful to figure out how to fit this in to your budget.

This same SunTrust survey shares that parents make tradeoffs to help children’s dreams come true. They sacrifice dining out (42%), shopping (35%), vacations (29%), retirement savings (21%), other savings (25%), paying off debt (27%) and upgrading their car (23%).

Wow, those are some crazy stats right? Parenting is all about sacrifice but guess what? That doesn’t mean your sacrifice has to be uneducated or unplanned. The folks at SunTrust have some great tips for taking the stress out of budgeting for extracurricular activities in these articles on onUp.com, and with the right planning, you can be confident that it’s possible to save, spend and support your child’s athletic dreams.

The SunTrust Budget Worksheet

How cool is this? You can now use this SunTrust budget worksheet to plan out saving and spending as you prepare for the upcoming sports season. This includes everything from travel to snacks and literally everything in between.

My husband and I sat down and went over our son’s sports budget for 2018 using the SunTrust budget worksheet. It’s funny how there were so many expenses that we hadn’t included simply because they were smaller items or purchases that never really made a huge impact on our budget at the time. However, when you add them all up, you think, did really we spend over $400 on snacks at events last year? Little eye openers like that might prompt you to make a few more Costco runs before travel to cut back on the last minute purchases that you make on the road.

This exercise was really helpful for us and not only did it help some weak spots in our financial sports planning, but we also discovered some areas that we felt we do very well in. Nothing feels better than money well spent, and I have to say we truly believe in the activities that our kids participate in and the money that we spend to do so.

I highly recommend that you download the SunTrust onUp Budget Worksheet and start your journey toward financial confidence today. A financial win when it comes to your sports budget, is also a financial win for the entire family!

Here’s a fun little SunTrust commercial that any sports parent can appreciate! Watch as these parents beam with pride as their little girl takes her chance at the spotlight: