Quick Update

The last few days have been a bit of a whirlwind.  Jordan's grandmother passed away on Tuesday and we had to find a way to get him to her funeral for Monday.  I was going to go with him, but flights for both of us would have been upwards of $4,000-$5,000 - so it wasn't feasible.  He is on his way now, caught a flight this morning up to NWT.  I'm thankful for our emergency fund, but reminded that it simply isn't big enough to cover real emergencies.  Sure, $500-$1,000 is good for day to day small things that come up - but not for something like this.

After Christmas, I think we'll look into getting this organised a bit better.

In the meantime, my family is in town to do some major Christmas shopping for a few days.  I don't really have a list guiding me this year, but I'm hoping to get some shopping done and cross a few people of the list.

I hope you all have a good weekend!

~Jessie

Trip to See a Mortgage Broker

I've talked on and off a lot about our plans to buy a house eventually.  We are currently so torn between buying my Great Aunts home (whenever she's ready - at an as of yet undetermined time) and buying a new construction home.

When I wrote about this in November last year, we had a list of things we needed to accomplish before we could seriously think about it.  I'm pleased to see that we're well on our way to accomplishing all of these things.  We've paid off all of our debt and managed to increase Jordan's credit score by around 100pts.  We are sitting in a very good position to buy a home - we now  need to increase our down payment - it's the last step!

• Jordan's truck loan is paid off
• My student loans are paid off
• Jordan's credit score is higher
• We have money in the bank!

We went to see a mortgage broker over the weekend, and brought him our credit reports & scores from equifax.  We didn't want to actually get pre-approved, so there was no need for him to do a hard inquiry which would show to all lenders in the future, but we wanted to show him the hard facts so we could have a realistic conversation.

The broker was so helpful!  He informed us that based on our incomes and credit scores we would have no problem securing a mortgage between $300-350k, which is what our plan was (how perfect is that).  He did say that we could probably stretch it to $400k if we had a 20% or better down payment - but that's not in the cards.  Jordan and I also don't want a mortgage that big - so not a problem.  

We ran some scenarios with him that included purchasing my aunts home or a new build, and both seem really possible.  He told us that the benefit of buying a new home is that the builder will absorb the closing costs, GST and other legal fees.  The price of the house - is the price of the house.  If we buy my aunts home, we'll have to pay closing costs as well as GST (gross) - depending on how it all comes together.

Speaking of how it all comes together, he said something we could do to avoid the down payment altogether is put my name on the title of the house, then re-finance it for the purchase price.  We would then take my aunts name off the title, and give her the money.  We hadn't heard of that idea before - and it would really help because then we'd have all the down payment money available to use for much needed renovations.

Right now, Jordan and I are so so so torn on what is best for us.  We're ready to take our lives to the next stage and that stage doesn't involve roommates.  We know we want to have it all sorted out before August, so that we come home from our honeymoon and are in our new space.  

What would you do?  What questions would you ask yourself?

Our Credit Scores

In preparation to meet with a mortgage broker last weekend, Jordan and I checked our credit scores.  The last time we had done this was almost an exact year ago for me and two years ago for Jordan - the results were surprising on both accounts.

My score has gone down, and Jordan's has gone up - significantly.

My equifax score went from 769 to 755.  Two years ago, my equifax was 749.  I feel pretty good about the score and understand why it went down a touch.  When we got our joint credit card, they checked my credit - so I have a recent hard inquiry on my report.  Further to that the history of that card is very short (three months).

When Jordan was looking at purchasing his truck two years ago, the bank told us it was about 650 (I can't remember the exact number).  I wound up having to be the sole name on the loan because of it, though Jordan made all of the regular payments.  Jordan had to do some work clearing up an old debt and starting to re-build/build his credit.  Part of that process involved getting as secured credit card with his bank - keeping the balance low and making regular payments.

Well, the diligence paid off.  His credit score, two years later is 747.

We are more confident than ever about seeing the mortgage broker.  We are so looking forward to what he will tell us about our readiness to buy a home of our own.

Do You Netflix?

Jordan and I were watching TV this past week and a commercial for Netflix came on.  Normally I just ignore them, but the tag at the end said 'now in Canada' - which of course got me thinking.

Netflix claim to fame is "Unlimited TV episodes & movies instantly over the Internet"  For $7.99/month - we can supposedly use our Wii/PS3/Computers to watch anything/as much of it as we like - interesting proposition seeing as how we currently spend about $60/month just on our TV/Movie package with Shaw.

Right off the bat I see that our favorite shows are not available: House and Bones - though we can watch those on Global TV's website and I can watch all my favorite Slice shows (Gail Vaz Oxlade) on their website.  Law & Order SVU is also not available on Netflix, but I can watch that on CTV.ca.

hmmm... this is not looking so good Netflix.  Perhaps, it's not so good for current TV shows.

I went to the blockbuster website and did a random search on Netflix to see if I could find any new releases.  I looked for Toy Story 3, Sex and The City 2, and Splice - not of which are available yet on Netflix.

So what is?  Well, it appears that the only movies/TV shows that are avilable are quite old - movies that have been on the shelves of blockbuster for months if not years.

Maybe I'm not looking into this deep enough - but I'm not sure that Netflix could replace our Shaw subscription - so I ask you.  Do you Netflix?  Does it supplement your TV with Shaw or another provider, or does it replace any service you have?

Three Month Spending Trends

I have been looking forward to writing this post for the last few months,  we've finally been able to review three months of spending patterns for Jordan and I since we combined our finances and started using our joint credit card.  Several of my readers have commented that they thought our credit card budget/planned spending was high - and they weren't sure why.  Seeings as Jordan and I have consistently blown the budget - I wasn't really sure why either.

There are a few trends that are glaringly obvious:

• We don't budget for all the categories we spend in
• We don't spend nearly what I thought we did/need to for groceries/cleaning house supplies
• Our 'planned spending' which is a bit of a catch fall is almost double!
• Our 'other' is ridiculous

We had actually intended for travel/education/wedding/annual expenses to just come from the planned spending or other categories, but I wanted to break it down further to really look at our spending.  The gifts category I'm not so worried about budgeting for, because when we purchase gifts I just transfer the money from our ING gift account.  The wedding fund is treated the same way, with moving money from our savings account to cover the expenditures.

Here is the spending summary in context with the budget:

I'd like to give a bit more context to the categories, so here is the list really broken down:

Our planned spending is dominated by booze, eating out, and entertainment (to a small degree).

Our other category includes pets (the fish), medical, vehicle maintenance, clothes/shoes, and hair cuts.

The education category includes parking for Jordan when he goes to school once a week, but this will need some padding soon when I go for my CHRP.





So, on average and not including gifts or wedding stuff (as described above) we have blown the budget by about $800/month

It's something that I'll need to go over with Jordan, but we'll have to decide if we need to find money from other parts of the budget and/or cut spending to make up for the shortfall.

I don't think it's realistic to cut eating out and booze expenditures all together - but we certainly can try to cut back a lot in that area.  Alone it's not enough.  I'm also thinking we could try to drive my car more often then the truck because it's better on gas - but I'm not sure how much we will actually save doing that.  The other thing that we could try to do is not buy clothes/shoes/vehicle maintenance all in the same month.

I would really love your honest thoughts - I've you're still reading.  I'm looking for suggestions more then just 'don't buy so much beer' - but how to stick to the budget better when we're using credit cards and how to plan for clothes when their for work ect (not frivolous).   If you want to tell me we spend too much on eating out - that's okay too :)

November Monthly Budget

You'll notice that there are a couple of fields that are empty already (roommates rent and Jordan's credit card) - that's because those transactions have already happened.  My budgets tend to be very active, always updated.

There is also a huge credit card payment - this is due to my reimbursable expenses (work trip).  About $2,200 of this is not Jordan or My house hold spending.  That still put's us over budget and the period isn't over yet (it will be on Nov. 5) - but I think we're getting better at this.

Our planned spending and savings categories are as per normal - nothing special here - just slow and steady.

Finally, we have to exciting things we're able to to make great strides toward this month.  We're able to make some very large contributions to our house fund and our wedding fund.  The house fund contribution is to pay ourselves back from what we have borrowed over the last couple of months.

slow and steady

There's not a lot of new things to report lately, other than I have a dreadful stomache bug.

We're still saving, slow and steady for all of our goals - and I'm hopeful that they'll all be met.

We have gone over our credit card budget, but trying to reign that in as best we can until Saturday.  This was from some Christmas shopping and more recently a trip back home.  Well, that's what did it in the end - but we could have planned a bit better and not splurged on other things.  My mom suggested that perhaps the majority of our spending happenes at the beginning of the cycle - so we run out at the end.  I'm going to see if I can graph our shopping days to explore that a bit further.

I'm not as excited for Christmas as I usually am by now...I feel like something is missing.  Not sure exactly what it is, but I'm on the look out for some Christmas Cheer.