There's a few more things there, but I'm not quite ready to share all of that yet. I am though, ready to share our draft baby budget. This is with carrying our home in Alberta, and living in BC with family.
I would really appreciate any thoughts or advice you have!
Onto monthly expenses - these are our normal expenses for maintaining our house in Airdrie. I've reduced the utilities slightly, but not a lot just in case. It will be winter, and while the house won't need to be heated to 20, it will need to stay at 10 Celsius so pipes don't freeze.
We'll still have cell phones, though our contracts are up for renewal in November so there will hopefully be a smaller bill by the end of the year.
We still have the car payment, mortgage, and our LOC payments. I'm leaving our monthly spending at $1,700 (what it is now) because while we'll spend less on gas etc. with me at home, I'm assuming their will be baby expenses that will balance that out.
My employer will keep all my benefits going, I just have to pay for my Long Term Disability premium (which I'm happy to do).
We're able to keep doing some of our planned saving/spending, but at a much lower rate.
For the first 15 weeks of my maternity leave, my employer 'tops up' my EI to 70% of my salary. That means that we'll have approximately an additional $900/bi-weekly during that time. My plan is to bank all of that money - but maybe it would be better to drop that all on the LOC (~$6750 total) or maybe to add to our vacation or emergency funds?
What do you think?
I thought I left a message before but it must have disappeared. I would sell your house now. It looks like Canada is moving into a recession. If you think that oil prices have hurt your house value, wait until the word recession is thrown around and unemployment increases. Sorry to be so negative but some house values here still aren't back to what they were 6 years ago. If you're spending $1850 to hold into a house, I would sell it. I hope I'm wrong and house prices bounce back there.
ReplyDeleteThanks ND - we won't be selling the house yet, need to see how some other things pan out first. Until I know more, I'm not sure I want to post about it but we definitely won't hang on to it forever. Even if we do sell it, we'll buy another, so we'll still have a mortgage etc. that we have to manage along with the rest of the budget.
DeleteSmart move banking the top up pay, I think having a nice emergency fund will be nice when you are off with baby. Are you able to rent your home? Or would that be way to complicated/stressful?
ReplyDeleteWe were looking at renting to a cousin of mine, but things changed for him and for us - so we've now decided to list the house.
DeleteThanks, we are in a similar boat and this is great to have to compare to. Can you rent your house in the meantime?
ReplyDeleteWe were looking at that as an option, but have decided to sell after all.
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