Hello all! and welcome back for our last spend report of 2020.

December was another higher than expected month for us, further highlighting to us how important it is that we track our income and expenses.

Our goal for tracking along with these spend reports was to live our lives as normal – not changing anything about our spending and just tracking the results to see where we would be for the majority of the year.

We ended up tracking this for the months April – December so we feel we got a really good grip on the high’s and low’s of our spending ranges.

We’ll break down our month and then move on to what we plan to do moving forward so stay tuned.

December’s Spend

We were meant to be back home with Mrs. FIC’s family for the holidays but for obvious reasons that was unable to happen. As our plans fell apart for travel we decided to splurge a little bit on some presents for the family and also made ourselves up some extra nice meals over the holidays.

I had a few weeks off to spend with the wife and baby so just being home that extra time idly also led to a few purchases potentially out of boredom but who’s to say?

We also ordered in some baby-proofing gear for the house which should be one off’s.

Overall spending $8,000 is too much especially for a month where we’re not really doing anything that spectacular but as I mentioned in the lead up we were just going with the flow this year and we’ll look to make a few changes moving forward.

There was, however, one bright spot and we’ll get to that now with our overall cashflow:

The bright side is that we received a third pay-check for the month of December which really saved our month.

We were able to produce an income of over $22,000 which allowed us a positive cashflow of nearly $14,000 for the month.

Now, preferably as we aim to save more and more and invest the proceeds our goal will be to lower the spending rather than continuing to increase the income as that’s the more sustainable path for our progress.

We’ve detailed before that we will always have average expenses due to our location being an inflated one but there are some levers we believe we can pull to drop our expenses, the first of which would be our dining out (or order in) and another would be to try and cut back our cable/phone expense.

2020 totals (April – December)

All this is showing is that our spend would have been about $90,000 for 2020. We had set out a goal to “cashflow” $6,350 per month for the year and we were able to beat that number by $7,127.00 so that’s a big win.

Moving forward we’ve upped that $6,350 target to $6,500.

And that’s all we have for today.

Let us know what you think of our spend report and your own spending in the comments or over on Instagram @FindependenceCanada and we’ll be sure to get back to you.

Also, if you don’t want to miss another post be sure to subscribe to the blog and follow along on our journey!

Thanks for stopping by,

FIC.