Welcome Little Man!

Guess what guys?! We have welcomed our little baby boy into the world!  He's about four weeks old now and our first month with him has been a whirlwind.  He's absolutely perfect in every way.  I have to say, that our family has also been absolutely amazing.  I've had a tonne of...

EI Salary Top Up

I'm so happy to be writing two such positive posts in a row.  I checked my online paystubs this morning and found that my employer paid employment insurance top up has been approved and processed. A small bonus here, is that when I did my calculations earlier in the year for planning - I forgot that I had already maxed out my CPP/EI premiums for the year - so the benefit is about $65/pay more...

Employment Insurance (EI)

It's finally come through!  Woohoo! My recent employer took their sweet time to process my maternity leave, and didn't issue my Record of Employment (ROE) - which is required to get EI benefits - for five weeks!  Yes, yes, legally they are required to submit it to Service Canada within 5 days - but they didn't.  It's all sorted now, but I was getting super stressed out for a couple...

It's Official

No, baby's not here yet, it's official that we have listed our house in Alberta for sale.  We were holding on to it for a while because it looked like one or two of my cousins might be interested in renting it for a while - but that fell through. After many conversations amongst ourselves, and our Real Estate Agent we thought listing now made more sense then taking the risk of unknown tenants...

Spend Report Catch-Up

Whoops!  I missed the August Spend Report last month with all the hubbub that was going on so I thought I would post August and September next to each other.  September of course marks a big shift in our spending habits mid-month.  The last two weeks of September I haven't been working...

$10,000

Some of you know that the company I used to work for has an employee ownership model.  As part of that, I own shares worth $10,284.30 USD.  If the USD/CAD conversation rates stay about where they are now, the refund should wind up being closer to $13,500 CAD. I should note that it is not an option to maintain my shares if I'm not an employee. As per my shareholder agreement, the company...

Job Loss

I've written about it before, about Employment Insurance, about preparing for the worst - but I've never actually experienced it. Many of you know that things are pretty rough in Alberta right now, with continued uncertainty around the oil & gas industry combined with mining - many organizations are struggling.  My employer is no different. I've officially been let go.  It's a pretty...

Networth Update

Despite declines in the value of my pension and some of other other investments, we've had an increase in cash savings and the company shares I own which are in USD and so have gone up because of the exchange rate. That combined with steady re-payment of the mortgage, LOC, and vehicle means that...

Satellite Radio

I've had Sirius satellite radio for a longggg time. My dad actually first got a family plan, and both my brother and I, himself and my mom all radios for Christmas one year when I was still in college.  It was one of my favorite gifts as I spent so many weekends driving back and forth between Alberta and BC. I didn't actually realize until several years later that there was an annual subscription...

July Spend Report

I was going back through the last few months of (few) blog posts, and realized I missed posting my July spend update. So, here it is. Our July spend, plus the average for so far this year. July is always a bit more expensive for us because there are a lot of birthdays (mine, my mom's & Jordan's...

Photography

When Jordan and I were planning our wedding, I knew I wanted a photographer. I didn't want to go bankrupt over one, but I wanted someone who's job it was to catch all the moments I wouldn't see that day. I had some people tell me I wasn't spending enough, and others tell me that their favorite photos...

Priorities

People are very quick to tell you that babies don't have to cost a lot of money.  That we, as a population, spend far more then is actually necessary. To be fair, by people, I mean people who are 20-40 years older than me - at least those are the ones in my life who generally make the comment; I'm sure others have other experiences. The first time my grandmother said it to me, I responded with...

Time is Flying By

Wow...how is time moving by sooo quickly right now. Today, I'm 31 weeks pregnant - so anywhere from 6-11 weeks left (ish) before baby arrives.  I only have four more weeks left of work before I start my scheduled vacation, which will convert to maternity leave once baby shows up.  Four more weeks, and I head to BC to join my husband and actually live together again! Wow. I'm pretty e...

EI & CPP

Today's a great day guys! We get our paystubs today for tomorrow's payday and I've maxed out my CPP and EI contributions for the year - which means each pay going forward will be an extra $200. Woohoo! For any non-Canadians... CPP is the Canadian Pension Plan .  It's required for employees and employers to contribute a fixed amount about to a maximum each year.  Once you retire, you...

Birthday Camping Trip!

We're heading camping for the next four days to go camping and celebrate our birthday's.  Both mom, Jordan and I are all July babies. It's actually the first birthday I can remember working in a very long time...but as soon as the clock strikes five I'll be out the door and driving to BC to...

Budgeting for Baby

You know that Jordan and I have decided to hold off of buying a home in BC just yet, but I'm not sure if I've shared that we're also holding on selling our home in Alberta.  This is for a couple of reasons, but the largest is that it's not a good time to sell with the current oil prices/economy...

Free Things

After writing June's spend update post, I wanted to share with you one of the free things that we do just about every weekend...and that's taking the dogs on a new adventure.  Here's a couple pictures from the last couple of weekends. This first one is playing in a creek.  We go...

Baby Spend - So Far

Stroller - UppaBaby Vista 2015 - $855 As most of you know, Jordan and I have been saving up for baby for years...little bits at a time.  We're now at that place where we can spend on baby things, and we are completely prepared for that in our budget, woohoo!  We had put away $10,000 over threeish...

June Spend Report

Wow...it's July already?  I'm not entirely sure how that happened.  We've already celebrated Jordan's birthday and have both mine and my mom's coming up soon too. Here's June's spend numbers. Gas, eating, and groceries all continue to trend high.  This is expected given our travel...

New House - Not Yet

So unfortunately, Jordan and I had to let the house go that we had put an offer on.  The list was for $250,000 which was our offer but to get the house where it needed to be would have been about $90,000 in renovations (with a LOT of sweat equity).  After doing an appraisal, we found out that it would only add about $20,000 worth of market value.   We didn't think it would be 100%...

Spend Report Update

It's been a few months since I've posted a spend report update - mostly because there was a new line item 'baby' which we weren't quite ready to share yet. Now that we have, I can get back to posting these regularly. Gas is fluctuating quite a bit right now, because either Jordan or I are driving...

Other Monies on Leave

Yesterday when looking at our income while on Maternity Leave, I mentioned that I'll also be eligible to apply for the Canada Child Benefits which include: Canada Child Tax Benefit (CCTB) Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB) GST/HST credit, and Any other applicable provincial programs. Due to income restrictions, Jordan and I will only be eligible for the National UCCB ($100/month).  We are...

Income on Leave

In the last few months I've gone through countless iterations of our budgets for when I'm on maternity leave, for the new house, for carrying both mortgages for short time until our Alberta house sells....sooooo many budgets. Before I delve into the current one, I thought I would share our income situation. With Jordan's new job in BC, he got a bit of a raise.  Of course income taxes, benefit...

More News!

So not only are Jordan and I expecting a baby, we're also moving! We've had an offer accepted on a little 1960's bungalow in my home town and are just working through financing, a renovations budget, insurance, etc. before we waive conditions.  We're going to be selling our home here in Alberta,...

Big News!

Those moccasins aren't for the dogs... Jordan and I have been keeping our lips zipped about this for a while, but now that we're at the halfway mark we wanted to share with you all that we're joining the ranks of personal finance bloggers with a ba...

Networth Update

There's been a lot going on lately and we're not quite ready to do a full update - but I wanted to get my net-worth posted because it's been a while. We've just broken through the $150K mark, and are sitting at $151, 760. This is in large part due to the contributions and performance of my pension,...

Life Insurance - The Saga Continues

Note, this is not a sponsored post - just an ongoing commentary about our adventures with Life Insurance. Before Christmas, I did an initial post on Life Insurance and my thoughts about what our needs are.  At that time, I thought we would need a 500K policy on myself and $400K on Jordan. I reached out to Glenn Cooke of Life Insurance Canada who is strongly recommended by Gail Vaz Oxlade...

We did it!

Today is payday, and because of my recent raise, we were able to top up the Baby Fund and hit 100%. So...now what to do with those regularly occurring deposits into that account....  We've been contributing $300/month towards it for the longest time. I'm thinking on one hand we could put the money towards the line of credit...but on the other hand, maybe we should target our next closest savings...

Sooo Close

Do you see it? Do you? We're now over 90% towards hitting our baby fund goal.  We had a big bump from our Tax Return, and from cancelling our Gym Membership (that added $60...

Tax Time!

I love tax time. I've just gone through and triple checked and then submitted our tax returns.  We use TurboTax - for under $30 at Costco, it makes filing sooo easy. I used to do our taxes by hand first, and then use TurboTax - just in case there were discrepancies...and there never has been....

Salary Review

Well, it's that time of the year again...salary review time. Most of you know that my career in in Human Resources. Specifically right now, I work in the Learning & Development department of my organization. I've been with my organization now for about 7 years, and have about 8-9 years combined experience. Given the state of the economy right now for my industry, there's not a lot of butter...

2015 Budget

Last week I showed you our goals and progress for savings/debt repayment - now I'd like to show you how we're getting there with our 2015 budget. We won't hit each of our goals 100%, but we're going to move the needle significantly on all of them. Jordan has settled in to his new job, and it is...

Savings/Debt Goals

Moving forward on the update train is where we are at with our saving/planned spending goals and our debt-pay off. The goals for the first three planned spending categories come  from our average spending over the last few years in each.  It's how we set up our monthly savings rate as well....

Networth Update

It's mid-March, but just to catch up here's where we are at in terms of Networth. The big dip from January to February was a change in value in my employee-owned shares at work. Since the dip, my Tangerine funds have done better then expected, we've re-started several automatic-savings plans, I...

January/February Spend Report

Catching up from the first few months of the year, here is our January/February spend reports. January was big on groceries because we were stocking up both my and my mom's pantry's, and gas spiked in February because we'll be driving a lot more to visit each other on weekends. We had a big expense...

It's March?

When did that happen? It's been a crazy couple of months.  A lot is on the horizon for Jordan and I, and I'm so excited to share it with you. I have, for...well, for forever, have wanted to move back home.  At the same time, I also thought that it would be impossible, that there is no work for me there, and so it was sort of wishful thinking.  I certainly didn't think that Jordan...