This is the day to day story of me attempting to dig myself out of a financial mess...
I am a third year BBA student, keep track of how I get myself out of this pickle.
It has been ages since my last update... A baby will do that...
I am now back into the swing of thing with school starting again and work continuing to keep me occupied. Some recent news is that we bought a condo! The subject removal is today. It is a three bedroom place with 1800 square feet. We got it for $239500, a pretty good deal for a completely updated place! This will continue to take time away from my blogging until our move in date of October 8.
Summer has taken me away from the world of the internet! It is strange what happens when you spend time outdoors, you seem to forget your finance blog... I have not forgot about finances just the blog. We have been able to stay very close to our budget this summer. It is a very good thing because last summer things got out of control. Our spending went up and our income went down. This is not a good combination.
This summer spending has remained the same and for the last half of summer income has gone up! This will allow us to pay down our credit card a little faster as well as to start looking seriously at buying a condo. I get a crazy rate of 1.75% because I work at a bank!
The Condo is three bedrooms and about 1200 square feet. The asking price is $239 000 but it has been on the market for over a year. This number may be flexible. It is close to public transportation that will allow me to get all the way downtown in 50 min. This keeps the options open as to where I can find accounting positions once done school.
I have started biking a bit again. I now have a little more time in my schedule so that I am able to use my bike instead of my car for transportation. So far this week I have biked home from school once, to work once, and back from work twice! This means I have biked a total of 35KM. It is not much but It is a start.
Our son is growing like a weed. He is smiling a fair bit ever day and is a very happy baby. There was another baby shower recently, our biggest one yet, where we received may gifts. Since we already had a far bit of stuff we retuned many items and got over $200 in gift cards! We will use these to buy things when needed. It will be a great way to reduce costs so that we can continue with our debt repayment.
Speaking of debt repayment, it is going slowly... We have not had the cash flow to be able to pay the VISA down as fast as we have wanted. This month should be a little better as we will finally be getting our child tax benefit and child care benefit. This will include back payments for a total of $700. I will also be getting my bonus from work of around $500. Now it would be nice to put all of this to that VISA but sadly we have a couple of things that need to come first. Our windshield is cracked so we need to pay our $200 deductible. We also need to get an oil change, I should be able to get another free one via mystery shopping, but it does require cash now. We also need some clothing since all of my pants and shorts are falling apart. All of this combined with the two week waiting period for EI that is coming up for the wife's maternity pay will make it so we will be back down to the normal small payment this month of $150.
We are lucky enough to have access to a large garden that is shared with many people from our church. We all pout in about $25 for seeds and commit one day every two weeks for gardening. Five or six couples are involved in this and the garden produces enough vegetables for us and our families. All of the food is grown organically with no pesticides or fertilizers.
I figure that we will save about $25/week in groceries once the crop is ready to harvest. Just a little bit of time and effort gives us a chance to build a community as well as save some money.
The first time out camping this year was a blast! We were with a larger group of people that we enjoy hanging out with. On Saturday we went for a short hike that included over 200 stairs! At the bottom of the stairs there is a nice set of rapids to relax by. A couple of us decided to go swimming! Yup it was very very cold, snow runoff will do that...
This week I am back to a crazy school schedule again, another midterm and some large projects are really taking their toll. My accelerated accounting class will be done in a couple of weeks, this will make my life a lot less stressful. We have been very good at sticking to our budgets recently, vary little going out and making great tasting low cost meals at home! Our $100 a week budget for food and entertainment has allowed us to go out a couple of times and we were able to save up for this camping trip!
Unlike last summer we will not be increasing our weekly budget to $200 due to our tight financial situation and our drive to pay off the VISA card. It is now at $3700 down from a high of $6200 in January.
I have now transferred a total of $40 with TD's Simply save to my TFSA.
