Welcome back everybody, and thank you for joining us for another edition of our spend reports. I suppose you could say this is our version of budgeting flexibly as we don’t have concrete number targets broken down by any form of categories – instead, we decided to make a yearly cashflow surplus target.

The cashflow surplus target is really just an amount we would like to get placed into our savings in the form of investments and actual cash savings for the year of 2021.

For the year 2021 we’ve set this goal to $6,500 per month, or $78,000 total. This is an aggressive goal and will require things to go well and us to curb our spending a bit perhaps – but we’re also really waiting to see what Mrs. FIC’s going back to work has to say about all of this as we don’t know what our actual added child care costs are as of yet.

An exciting side note to this update is that it officially starts off our first full year of spend tracking, so this will give us a much more locked in look at where the holes are in our bucket so to speak.

Now let’s get after it:

January’s Spend

So if you’ve been following along for a while here, you’ll know that a $7,000 month is about average for us. We’re trying to get this down a little bit without compromising too many wants and needs especially as far as our son is concerned – his food bill isn’t it’s own category but it almost deserves to me as he’s now into eating salmon, steak, prawns and the like to try and raise him as a “loving-all-food-baby”.

Utilities are also a bit higher than usual and that’s just due to it being heating season up here in Northern Canada where it really isn’t optional to have it off for any amount of time.

Food was all over the place, we did a great job limiting our dining out expenses as previous months have always been well into the hundreds so I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that as a result our grocery bill went up.

The only real win over last month was the fact that we didn’t have to buy a bunch of Christmas presents, foods etc. that come along with the holiday season – otherwise they were similar months.

January’s Cashflow

We fell $1,276.17 shy of our goal to save $6,500 this month. CPP and EI coming off the pay checks again certainly didn’t help matters and neither did having no overtime hours to speak of either but those things will pick up through the year, OT is really not something that I want to build expectations or budgets around anyways as I like to be home with the family as much as reasonably possible (it is still nice for a little boost from time to time though).

That’s all that we’ll cover here today, if you have any questions or comments please contact us over on our social media pages:

INSTAGRAM: @FindependenceCanada
TWITTER: @FindependenceC1

Thanks for stopping by,

FIC.