2010 Budget and Financial Goals

Wow, today is the last day of 2009 - with that in mind, I thought it apt to post my 2010 budget and financial goals. 

My budget here is almost identical to the draft 2010 budget I posted a month ago. The only significant change is to the parking.  I've paid up to February at my current rate and come March I'll be getting surface parking at work.  It will be automatically deducted from my pay and is less then i'm currently paying (woohoo!)

I've decided that although I'm budgeting $500/month for my student loans - I'm going to leave each auto withdrawl at $75 (for each loan).  I will do manual deposits bi-weekly to make my $500/month target.  That way - if anything comes up, I'm not locked in.

I have a lot of 'savings' categories - however; the only true savings are my RRSP and my emergency fund.  Further to that, after I reviewed the comments left on my draft post I added an annual expenses category.

I have about $300/month left over which is about pefect.  You'll see once I start posting bi-weekly budget's I don't actually use that much for entertainment/other - it just gives me some flexiblity.  It was a pretty stressful year having every penny accounted for - this provides me with a bit of stress relief.

On to my financial goals....

 You'll see that the timeline is over a year in each category.  After doing a little number crunching, I figured that i'll have to come up with an additional $2,500 and change in lump sum payments to reach these goals.  I think that this is completely do-able.  I should note here that Jordan and I are each contributing $150/bi-weekly to the house down deposit fund.

My student loans are listed here, as well as Jordan's truck loan.  One of our major goals this year to is to wipe out all of our debt!  You can see that it will take about half the year to pay of my Canada Student Loan, after that, I'll roll the $425 over to my Alberta student loan.  To pay off my Alberta Student Loan in the second half of the year, I'll have to come up with an additional $2,000.

So that's it - my budget and my/our financial goals for 2010.

To make it all work, I'll have to come up with an extra $4,500 this year.  I'm hoping to accomplish this through my 2009 tax return, two 'extra' pay days this year, bonus' at work and making more money!