$4,500 represents one month of expenses (I know, crazy!) and I would like to reach that this year.
Christmas/Gifts is always saved for and spent as is vacation. I've got our personal accounts tracked with goals - but Jordan's real goal is until he has enough for a PlayStation 4 - he's got some gift cards too, so I'm sure this will be spent soon. I'm a hoarder and never know what to buy myself...so I've got some leftover birthday money and some Christmas money in my account. We're not actively saving for any home improvements right now but I stuck a couple hundred dollars their just in case anything comes up.
As you already know - we don't have any automatic savings set up for these except for the baby fund ($40/week) because of the unpredictability of Jordan's wage. I wanted to start the year strong, so started each account with some cash from Jordan's vacation pay out and my end of year bonus - but the rest will be ad-hoc (the same as the additional debt payments).
I don't track retirement as a particular savings goal, because it's just so automatic. Each of my paydays we contribute $50 to purchase shares where I work through a payroll deduction program and my pension savings are an automatic 5% from my employer and 5% from me (not optional).
I also still contribute $25/week to my RRSP streetwise account.
Jordan has no work RRSP program (he has under $2,000 from a previous job that did deferred profit share into an RRSP account) and so his savings are $75/week.
So all combined - I expect our retirement portfolio to increase by about $14,200 plus whatever market fluctuations we experience.
The last thing to decide is how to determine if Jordan's commission is automatically put to savings or debt - do we rotate it, or do we split if 50-50...or 80-20....or some other percentage.
Looks like a solid plan. We're also started to save for baby before getting pregnant, less stress worrying about that on top of being pregnant. Having a good savings buffer will also help when you're off of working since it looks like you're the lead income earner and there may be months when Jordan's income is lower.
ReplyDeleteThanks! That was exactly our thinking - the majority of the Baby Fund would be income replacement to supplement EI. You're right too that my income is higher than Jordan's and now with him being up to 50% commission based, there's some pretty big stakes variability.
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