Well well, 7 months along. Welcome to the monthly report! Considering it takes most people YEARS to reach FIRE, I’m doing okay I guess. I realize that I need to set some serious FIRE goals to allow myself to better measure success. I’d appreciate knowing what kind of goals you set for yourself financially? I do have a goal to pay all debt except Mortgage by June of 2020 (Which I’m secretly planning to beat). However I’m toying with the idea of setting specific goals for monthly expenses, income increases, savings rate, etc.
This should be a fairly easy thing to do. I guess I need to sit down and take the time to determine what is feasible in 1 year, 2 years, or 5 years. Time for some serious number crunching!
Blah blah T, get on with it. What happened in April, anyway?
Stats for Month 7
Here are some super-duper fun stats!
Saved: $290. Worst month ever…BUT, wait till you get to DEBT REPAYMENT before you judge us harshly.
Extra Income from Side Hustles: $97. This continues to be a struggle. More work required!
Debt Repayment: $4422!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks to a large income tax refund, and some diligent not-spending-money-on-other-stuff, we kicked ass this month. I’m hoping to maintain this streak for May and eventually beat my debt repayment goal of June 2020. WOOHOO!
Expense report for April
Total Spending: $5877. This is decent! My goal lately is to try to get under 6k monthly. I’ve done this 2 months out of 4 so far this year…I need to calculate the average to see where we’re at.
- Mortgage+Property Tax: $1710. I pay my mortgage weekly on Mondays. SURPRISE! April had an extra Monday. Fortunately I have a sinking fund in which I place a bit of extra cash to cover extra Mondays through the year.
- Water & Sewerage: $232
- Child Care: $360
- Stupid Bank Fees: $15
- Home Insurance: $184. I plan to NOT PUT THIS NUMBER ON ANY FUTURE MONTHLY REPORT, goshdarnit.
- Power: $256
- TV, Home Phone, Internet: $158
- Life insurance: $157
- Netflix: $13.99
- 2 Mobile Phones: $110
- Transportation: $608. Despite the fact that my province started charging carbon tax in April on fuel, our transport costs were down significantly this month. We can contribute this to zero car repairs on our 2 aged vehicles (and Hubs swapped out the winter tires himself!). That said we discovered the C-RV has a leak this week…slow but needs fixing. My driveway is starting to look like a Rorschach test.
- Charitable Donations: $178. Not a ton, but good for us. We helped out 2 people who really needed it through GoFundme, and a bit went to registered charities.
- Groceries: $914. High, but not bonkers like last month!
- Gifts: $23. Great improvement over March! This was YET ANOTHER kid’s birthday party. Kill me now.
- Medical: $7
- Hair: $170. Mine. Yep. I know.
- Health, Fitness, and Sports: $183. High because we had to buy M a new bike. We were gifted one but it is still too big! This also includes our healthy eating program fees, and swimming lessons for the kiddo.
- Clothing: $10. New socks for meeeeee!
- Fun Money: $588. Not the best but not the worst. Gotta improve this a bit more. One idea I’m toying with is tracking where my allowance goes (i.e. some goes into savings) to show a reduction in this number. Hubs allowance gets spent…all of it. As does M’s (his is very small). Also included here is dining out as a family ($186) and Lotto tickets ($32). We can definitely work on the dining out number.
In conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this monthly report. What can we do in May to improve our situation? Plans include finding a new home insurance provider, selling some of Hub’s stuff on eBay, and maybe some extreme couponing. Just kidding! I’d like to prepare some more healthy yet inexpensive meals, and maybe blog some reviews pertaining to budget-friendly recipes. Goals!
Nice job on the debt repayment! Looks like you’re on your way to optimizing all the other expenses. I’m surprised how much you spend on power. Is that normal there? I average about $60/month in BC, but that doesn’t include heat.
Hi Money Mechanic! $60 is crazy cheap! Let’s talk kWh. In January we used 2100 kWh AFTER installing 2 fancy heat pumps, while also burning wood mainly on weekends only. We have a 2400 sq ft home that is well insulated. This would be the worst month of the year for us, with Feb being equally bad at times. NB Power charges us 10.91 cents per kWh, plus water heater rental (approx $8 per month) + HST of 15%. I would be really interested to know your BC breakdown since I plan to retire there some day…:) I expect the recently imposed carbon tax to drive up the rates sometime soon.
Interesting you should ask 🙂 I just dissected my bill recently! I’ll start by saying thanks to BC Hydro for the 8% rate increase. So, the numbers… We have a 2000 sq ft home, fairly well insulated with newer windows. Of course, we’re talking different climate out here, but anyway. Our heat is not included in the bill, so you could add $100 to our monthly electricity bill to get closer to a real comparison. Regardless, our kWh cost is now $0.0945 for step one and $0.1417 for step 2 (starts at 1,376kWh). We average around 400-600kWh/month. Depends on how many power tools I’m running in the garage!! 2100 sounds like a lot of kWhs, is that normal for running a heat pump, or are you guys binge watching netflix 24/7? 😉 I should add that we are electric stove, water, and laundry. No gas.
Thank you for the breakdown. Very interesting! I believe heat is definitely the culprit. January’s average temperature was -9. Apparently we were more efficient than our neighbours that month. All that said it makes me wonder if there is something else going on, since it is so much higher than yours. We do have baseboards in the basement which are on most of the time as we use it every evening. I am going to look into shutting those off through the day to see what difference it may make. Thank you for sharing!