Passing the time during a long journey, or even a short one, can be a nightmare when you have kids in tow. “Are we nearly there yet?” – how often do you hear this throughout the course of a journey?

You might want to shout “not yet!” but you have to understand that travelling for little ones, or even big ones, isn’t the same as it is for adults. We understand that it takes time to get somewhere, and that the waiting is worth it, but they don’t, they just want to get where they’re going, and are usually over-excited as a result. The key? Stay calm, take deep breaths, and your serene exterior will hopefully seep its way to your children.

Despite that, the key is also to keep them entertained, and thanks to modern technology, with iPads and tablets now owned by most families, games with an educational twist can be played on the go quite easily.

There’s no excuse not to instil a bit of learning into a journey, after all, you might as well put the waiting to good use. Age plays a part in what kind of games you can play, so let’s check out a few suggestions.

Younger children (ages 0 to 6)

Bingo – a quick internet search will give you plenty of worksheets you can print out, and a fun child-friendly game of bingo is a great pass-the-time idea, which also helps children recognise numbers. You can also play this with shapes for the younger children in this bracket. The winner gets to pick a treat!

Match colours and shapes – again matching colours and shapes is a game of repetition, which is how we learn best. You can easily print out some shapes and colour blocks before you leave and put them in your travel bag, whipping them out when boredom kicks in, and this is also a different twist on a game of snap!

Words that start with… – Practising the alphabet and developing vocabulary is easily done on the go, simply say a letter, and get your little ones to give you a word that begins with that letter. Again, a prize for the best suggestions.

Eye spy – I’ve put this in the younger age range, but its great for any age really, and also helps develop awareness of surroundings and the alphabet again. You can pass hours with this one!

Older children (ages 6 plus)

iPad – Older kids do tend to turn towards technology for keeping their minds active. Whilst the iPad is great for playing games, you can also download some educational apps and play them together. Even games such as Candy Crush Saga can be used to help develop matching skills, but why not download a language app and learn some of the language of the country you’re heading to, together as a family?

Carmen San Diego – The famous computer programmes aimed at children of around 8-12 years will pass hours, and they won’t even realise they’re learning. Cleverly using characters and plots, weaving in word play and using alliteration, this is a good way to learn language skills and vocabulary, and can be done on the go.

Country’s flags and currencies – Weave learning into where you’re going, by matching flags and currencies, flags and languages etc.

As you can see, all our suggestions take away the focus of learning, yet sneakily kids will develop skills whilst they’re doing them. That’s the best way to do it in my opinion! Imagination games, word play, using awareness of space and surroundings, asking questions on what they think things are, and discussing it – these are all ways to pass the time and learn something along the way.

Life these days is lived increasingly in mid-air, somewhere we can’t see, in the ether if you will. It can be easier paper-wise, so you don’t have a drawer full of receipts and files, but whilst you can’t see all this information, it can feel like you have no reins on it, no control. This is all a bit of a recipe for stress.

So, how can we organise our digital life, so to speak, to make it less stressful, more streamlined, and less destructive on those forests by cutting down the paper?

Be password savvy – Any secure website will require a password, and it’s never advisable to use the same password for them all. If you get hacked then you’re running a huge security risk if you don’t mix it up a little. Variety is the spice of life, after all. Having said that, you don’t want to be remembering a head full of different passwords, and you certainly don’t want to be writing them down. A good way to use a password manager like Last Pass. Always generate important passwords using a strong password generator, rather than using real words.

Back up your files – Whilst they’re not paper-based, computer files still need to be organised and backed up. If your computer dies, you don’t want to be losing all your data, so for that I’d recommend using Dropbox as the cloud-type of storage you read so much about these days. Simply logging into your account will drag your information down from the sky and onto whichever machine you log into. Simple, and much safer.

Organise your files – Creating folders for the month and storing all paperwork relating to that month within it will make it easier to find things on the go. You can easily download your online statements etc and store them in that particular months’ folder. To keep it up to date again, delete folders after, say, three months, and keep it on a rolling system, so you don’t end up with a computer full of useless folders from four years ago!

Spreadsheets – They sound geeky, but they’re really not. If you’re a freelance worker, or undertake any kind of freelance work, then you will of course need to keep records of your work for tax purposes. I find a spreadsheet is a good way to keep a basic running tally, to go alongside the other records you need to keep. A simple tally like this will help you make quick calculations, rather than stressing yourself out with trawling through more complicated records.

Review regularly – When you’re trying to go paperless, you’re basically streamlining your life, so the key is to keep it simple. If it’s not working for you, play around with it a bit, and keep updating everything as you go. I don’t like to leave things to pile up, because that’s what clutters my mind and leads to stress. If you can keep on top of your admin, then you’ll be freer and more organised as a result.

If you have a spare $100 and put it in into something that returns 6%, in 40 years time it’ll be worth $1096. If you’re older and leave it there 30 years, it’ll be worth $602. Basically anything you spend $100 on now is costing you $602 in future dollars.

If you only have a spare $50, and are prepared to let that money sit there for 40 years, it’ll be worth $548. Just think if you get that money invested and out of sight, out of mind whenever there is extra. Here are just a few ways to save $50-100. As you can see, leaving it there an extra 10 years, is almost the same as saving double now.

The key is making it real.

I’ve found that the key to getting myself to invest is coming up with some numbers that make it real for me.

For example, if I’d invested $1000 a month in the VTI fund, which tracks the US stock market, for the last 10 years, that investment would be worth $205,000 now, compared to $120,000 of contributions. That’s even with the massive crash of 2008.

The Benefits of Giving Up an Unused Subscription

Let’s imagine that instead of paying $15 a month for a subscription you don’t really use, you’d invested that money for the last 10 years instead. In this case, even starting from $0, you would have over $3000 now after only depositing $1800.

The calculator I’ve used for coming up with the above tables is http://www.buyupside.com/calculators/dollarcostave.php

What you you have a spare $1000?

I know for some people the idea of having a “spare $1000” isn’t a reality, but also for many people it is. For example, you get a tax refund or the like.

Here’s what you can expect if you invest an extra $1000 that you have available.

At a moderate 6% rate of return, that money will have grown to

5 years: $1349
10 years: $1819
20 years: $3310

If you only have a spare $500, here’s what you can expected

5 years: $674
10 years: $910
20 years: $1655.

People are often really intimidated by investing. In my view, 30 is the absolute latest you should start. Obviously earlier is better but for any people they won’t do that. Starting at 30 still gives you 40 years until your 70, which in my mind is the point where I don’t want to be doing any paid work anymore. I can imagine that between 55-70, I’d want to scale back but not stop completely. Assuming, I’m around and healthy that long of course.

The graph below shows the change in the amount of money you’d have if you invest for 40 years vs. an alternative strategy where you start regular investing 5 years later. As you can see, the difference in the total amount you invest is only $20,000 but the difference in returns is over $250,000. For these calculations, I’ve used a fairly conservative rate of return of 6%, which is around about what a broad stock market ETF (exchange traded fund) will return. This is when you buy a fund that just tracks the whole market rather than selecting stocks.

If you do this within a tax-free account like a ROTH IRA in the US, then you are all set to keep all of your profits. In my view everyone should be saving $100 a week, religiously. If you can’t do this, there are various ways to hustle to earn that level of extra income, just as working online on a site like odesk or fiverr, or helping a friend out in their business.

The calculator I used for this is from https://www.moneysmart.gov.au/