(This article was first published on NDTV Profit.)

Every day should be Mother’s Day! This might sound cliched, but it is true. Mothers are special – they need to be celebrated every single day. There is so much that we learn from our mothers. There are important life lessons that our mothers teach us, often without even us or them realising it.

Apart from life lessons, mothers also teach us a lot about how we should be handling our finances or manage our money. Our mothers may not be financial wizards, they may not be money experts, but no one knows how to get the best out of the available monetary resources like they do.

Here are the five money lessons that we have learned from our mothers.

Save

They take the saying ‘a rupee saved is a rupee earned’ to heart. Mothers avoid unnecessary expenses to make sure that they spend less and save more. This is something that all of us, especially the younger generation, needs to learn. We tend to spend a lot, often more than we earn. But saving is a habit we should form because we never know when we might need to dig into our savings. It’s a nest that gives great comfort to have.

Budget

Mothers are able to save well because they are able to budget their expenses well. A mother knows exactly how to allocate money to different expense heads. She knows where the money needs to be spent and how much of it should be spent where. Budgeting allows mothers to make sure that money is spent in a proper manner. When you set a monthly budget on different expenses such as entertainment, food and personal shopping, you will be able to fulfil your necessities as well as your desires. Without budgeting, you might run the risk of buying what you don’t really need and not having money for what you need. A mother never lets that happen.

Negotiate

Be it with the vegetable vendor or a jewellery showroom owner, a mother will never pay what she was asked for in the first place. She will always negotiate. Negotiation stems from her ability to save more and spend less and invariably, she succeeds in bringing the cost price of any product or service down by negotiating her way to a bargain. Negotiation is an art that we should learn from our mothers.

Patience

Patience is one of the most critical traits of a good parent. A mother understands this more than anyone else, which is why she nurtures her children patiently and dedicatedly. This quality also allows the mother to manage money well. She knows that no one gets rich overnight. All the comforts that one desires have to be worked hard for – be it for one’s own self or for one’s family.

Uncomplicate

More often that not, a mother knows exactly what is good for the family and exactly what is not. She will never complicate things, least of all her finances. But we do. We mix insurance with investment, we spend on luxuries instead of necessities. What we need to do is learn from our mothers and simplify our finances. We need to have a clarity on not only where we’re spending, but also where we’re investing. A simple financial plan is often the most productive.

This is just a small part of how much we can learn from our mothers. And even implementing some of it will hold us in good stead through our lives.