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.  The trick here of course, is that throughout the year, we draw on these accounts (which is what their for), so we never actually reach 100%.

We've been chipping away at the Baby Fund for a long time.  The idea here, is then when we do start our family, we won't be stressed and strapped for cash when I go on Maternity Leave.  I would love to see us reach $10,000 by the end of the year - we're actually on track to hit this in 2015, woohoo!

We don't have targets for each year for the Mortgage or the Kia either - these we just chip away at with the regular payments...though I do often do extra payments on the Kia...just little bits to help knock it down.

The LOC goes up and down...every time I make a few really good payments, we get behind somewhere else or something unexpected comes up and I need to dip in.  We are making progress here, but it's slow.  We put $800-$1,000/month here and as we hit other savings or debt targets (like paying off the escape), we add that payment to the LOC.

We don't have retirement savings goals for each year as a dollar value - my goal is to get to 10% of Jordan's gross pay, but right now we're still sitting around 7.75% right now...but each year we get a bit closer....because of my pension, I'm already sitting at 10%.

Phew! There it is.

CHRP - Exam One Down

On May 7th I wrote the first of two exams I need to pass before I will become a Certified Human Resources Professional (CHRP). These are some of the advantages of the designation as described on the CHRP website:

1. Proven Expertise - HR professionals who pursue the CHRP must meet all requirements set out by their provincial HR associations, which aim to measure their competence and experience as HR professionals. By pursuing the CHRP designation, you’ll prove your ability to tackle all aspects of HR and demonstrate to employers and colleagues alike that you are a true HR expert. Click hereto learn more about the steps to obtain your CHRP designation. 
2. Continual Learning – To maintain your designation, you will be challenged to continually update your knowledge and skills in HR. As a CHRP, you’ll gain expertise and leading edge knowledge to help you manage complex and dynamic HR issues and, ultimately, become a strategic advisor
3. Demonstrated Commitment – CHRPs must undergo rigorous studies, comprehensive exam(s) and ongoing learning. They are, in short, committed to the profession over the long-term. By pursuing your CHRP, you demonstrate your commitment to constantly updating your HR skills and highlighting your long-term passion for the profession. You join the class of HR professionals that employers seek out.
4. Knowledge Community – As a CHRP, you are part of an exclusive, nationwide community of HR experts. Through special events, conferences, publications and websites, you can connect with other HR professionals from across Canada. This powerful network proves invaluable as HR professionals look for solutions, ideas and the ability to connect with others in the field.
5. Ethical Behaviour – CHRPs commit themselves to high standards of ethical behaviour. They are held to the CCHRA National Code of Ethics that covers a range of important professional issues including confidentiality, conflict of interest, professional growth and more. You gain confidence from your employer, colleagues and peers with the knowledge that you are committed to a Code of Ethics that demands the highest standards for the profession.

Once I pass the first exam (NKE - national knowledge exam), I will formally be a CHRP candidate.  I'm excited to get my grades back....it will take 6-8 weeks!

House Fund Update

I'm pleased to share, that as of this Friday Jordan and I made it to.....(get ready for it)....

$10,000 

.....in our house-fund.  We're half-way to a respectable down payment!

J&J's Goals

I wanted to do a 2010 checkup on the goals that I started out with this year.  I did a search and found that they changed so often, it's no wonder that I feel like I havn't acheived much.  Of course, we did have the huge success of becoming debt free this year - but we didn't realize any of our savings/planned spending goals.  Part of this was the merging of our finances and working to sort out what that would look like.

In 2011, we have two huge life changing events.  Not only are we getting married, we intend on being prepared to buy a house.  While I can appreciate that it is important to have money set aside for all types of different things - these events will happen, so we best plan for them.  The other part of these two goals is that we wan to realize them before/on August 6, 2011.  That means, we have 8 months to get organized.

We currently have just over $6k in our house fund.  I had to move some money around to pay off our credit card bill before the due date, but have some money set aside to pay ourselves back next month.  By the end of December, we will have just over $11,250 set aside.  We anticipate needing, at a bare minimum $20,000 to purchase our first house (I've posted about the details of this before, but if you want them again, just let me know). 

So, goal Number One:  Save $8,750 in 8 months (by August, 2011)

Next is our wedding.  We currently have just under $300 set aside, but we have also already spent almost $6,000 of a project budget of just over $22,000.  By the end of December, we anticipate having set aside about $1,750.  We also anticipate that we will spend some of our planned spending budget (paid via credit card) will be eaten up by wedding expenditures - so we won't have to actually have that much cash sitting aside next summer.  That combined with talking with some family members, we anticipate some monetary gifts that will help us realize this in time

So, goal Number Two: Save $7,500 in 8 months (by August, 2011)

I imagine that we will continue to put money away for both Christmas/gifts as well as vehicle maintenance/emergencies - however this will be about $100/month - without strict goals.  We need the flexibility to be able to achieve our primary vision of a wedding and a home.

What's Next?

Now that Jordan and I are debt free, we are going to work on some of our short term goals before we ramp up our house fund.

Coming up right away are our:

• Christmas Fund
• Need to get to $1,500 in short order
• This pays for gifts as well as decorations and extra travel
• Travel Fund (new)
• We would like to set aside around $500 for summer travel plans
• If the house purchase goes through sooner rather than later, this could quickly be absorbed by the house fund
• Emergency Fund
• We would like to eventually have about $7,000 tucked away - but for now, I would be happy if we had $1,000.

• Education
• Jordan's going back to school
• This will probably cost $100-$200 for books ect.
• I'm going to start pursuing my CHRP
• Over the course of a year, this is going to cost about $1,000

We've decided that education is a joint expense because the benefits (increased income) is a joint reward.

Financial Priorities

My recent raise and the prospect of paying off on of my student Loans in April, prompted me to re-evaluate the financial priorties I had established at the beginning of the year.  I spent a couple hours talking about it with my mom - and when I asked well how does this look (pointing to an excel spreadsheet) she would say, well what's important?

hmm...what's important?

well, at the beginning of the year my goals (other then paying off debt) were to reach some saving milestones.  They included:

• Saving $12,500 (in combination with Jordan) towards a house down payment
• Saving $2,000 in my RRSPs
• Saving $1,000 into a Christmas/Gift fund
• Saving $500 for clothing

I beleive that I now have some different priorities.

1. Saving $12,500 (with Jordan) towards a house down payment
• we're actually trending to $11,200 and change.  This goal will continue to go up in increments until we are at 20% off $300,000 or $60,000.
2. Saving $500 for professional/work clothes
• I had almost acheived this and am now using the money to go to Palm Springs.  I'm going to start by saving $100/bi-weekly until I'm to $500 and then I will keep it maintained by contributing $25/bi-weekly
3. Starting a new/used vehicle fund
• My car will eventually crap out so bad that I need to spend significant $$ on repairs or need to just buy new/used - I have no end goal for this, I just want to start being more prepared for vehicle expenses. 
4. Continuing to contribute to my Christmas Fund for all the other gift giving oppotunities that come up every year
5. Continuing to contribute to my Emergency Fund until I have 3 months of essential expenses saved up.
• I currently have $1,100 saved and I think I need about $2,800
6. Starting a travel fund
• This might be flights to visit my Best Friend in Vancouver, or it could be gas to go camping - but either way I need to start putting money away for this.  It's important to the people in my life so it's important to me. 

Starting in May, you'll see the above categories represented in my bi-weekly budgets.

April's a Big Month

Not only do I get a raise this month and a third pay cheque.  I'll also have 96 hours of overtime paid out.  I'm going to make some huge strides towards some of my goals and be able to re-evaulate my current goals.

The following bi-weekly budgets (April 16th and April 30th) have some pretty big assumptions about what my new pay will look like and how much my overtime is worth - but I'm hopefully that I've done the math right.

They key things to notice are the gift fund categories and the CSL Lump Sum Pay.

What the above means, is that come the end of April I will have paid off my Alberta Student Loan and reached my Christmas savings goals!!!

That's prety darn incredible if I do say so myself.

Personal Goals

Hello All!

What an absolutley fabulous Christmas/New Years vacation I had! 

I'm feeling a little rusty, but am eager to get back into the swing of things.

Thanks to everyone for their postive feedback on my 2010 budget and financial goals - I think it's going to be an excellent year!  In terms of personal goals, I've only come up with a few so far.

• Give myself more time in the morning to get ready for work
• I often find that I wind up sleeping in and so only have 20 minutes to get out the door.  I want to push that to an hour and get my mind in body in shape using that time.
• Be a healthier me
• This means taking the stairs at work, drinking more water, being more active in general & eating salad

That's it!

I'm keeping it simple and acheivable.

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!

It's Payday!

Hurrah, it's payday.  Here's a breakdown for the next two weeks.

As mentioned last week, Jordan and I decided to but our house fund on hold for a month or two until things settle down with our housing situation.  Jordan also increased is truck repayment plan, and wanted to see how that would work out.  Because of that, and no more credit card debt repayment, I had an extra $600 this month to play with.

I kept my jar money at $300 which seems to be working.

I was going to break up the large sum, but in interests of meeting some of my short term goals, I'm going to go after them one at a time while maintaining my $25/bi-weekly contribution schedule.  So, this pay day, I'm putting $500 towards my Christmas fund which will have it fully funded for this year and $100 towards my emergency fund.

Have a great weekend!

So now what?

Now that I am credit card debt free, I ought to make a plan for going forward.  I have already written my revised 2009 goals which included:

1. Pay off my credit card
2. Have a debt free Christmas
3. Replenish my emergency fund to a minimum of $1,000 by the end of 2009
4. Increase my total RRSP contributions to $3,000 by the end of 2009

You have probably noticed that I moved my tracking bars around to reflect the changes.  I'm going to save $500 for my Christmas Fund as a priority, and then work on replenishing my Emergency Fund and Increasing my RRSP contribution.  Some would say, I believe, that I should put funds towards my E-fund first.  I think however; that if I don't save for Christmas now - I will go back into debt.  It's a priority for me not to let that happen - and should a small emergency occur I can use they money earmarked for Christmas.

I am also considering taking out an RRSP loan - which I would love to hear thoughts on.  When we get closer to tax time, I'll write a more thorough post on that.

I am going to continue using the jars, however; I'm going to look at increasing my entertainment and food jar bi-weekly allotments.  I would like to let myself enjoy the next four months without any significant financial stressors or worry.

Right now, I am thinking that my big 2010 goal will be to pay off my two student loans.  Do you think paying off a little more then $8,000 in one year is doable, or should I make this a two year goal?  or - Should I play catch up with my RRSP's - there's a lot to think about and plan for in 2010, and it's only 3.5 months away.

I suppose I've put out a few random questions and thoughts - I'd love to hear feedback on any of it

Revised Goals for 2009

I spent my lunch hour looking at my bi-weekly budgets from now until the first week of January, 2010 and I beleive the following to be some pretty solid goals that I can acheive.

1. Pay off my credit card

2. Have a debt free Christmas

3. Replenish my emergency fund to a minimum of $1000

4. Start a 'future fund' and save a minimum of $500

(I will explain this more when I open the account)

5. Have a minumum of $3000 in my RRSP accounts

When I started this blog back in January, 2009 I listed my goals here.

I beleive that I have acheived my first goal which was to become less neurotic about my finances. By no means am I completely calm and stress free at this point, but I have certainly come a long way. This blog, and the discovery of so many other personal finance blogs, has been an amazing resource for me. My second short term goal for 2009 was to pay off my credit card, as you know, I should be there within the next four weeks.

My Goals

(Very) Short-Term Goals (3-12 months):

• Become less nerotic about my finances by creating plans, and letting them work
• Pay off my credit card

Short-Term Goals (1-2 years):

• Save for 3 months worth of fixed expenses: $3,550
• Reach my RRSP deduction limit. My 2009 limit is $13,116
• Pay off both my Canada and Alberta student Loans
• Purchase shares at work
• Join my company pension plan (I will be eligible in October 2010)

Mid-Term Goals (2-5 years)

• Save $35,000 for a down deposit for a home
• Become a home owner
• Save for 6 months worth of fixed expenses
• Plan for Kids

Long-Term Goals (5+ years)

• Save for 12 months worth of fixed expenses
• Have Kids