Welcome back for the July iteration of our monthly spending reports.
This spend report just highlights how inconsistent spending can be as we were all over the map on where we spent our money this month.
This month featured a vacation and a wedding in a Covid-19 world.
Let’s take a look at the damage for July:
July’s Spend:
$9,148.79 is not the type of month that we’re aiming for but when we dive into the numbers a little further there is at least some justification.
Outliers for this month were us taking our 4 month old son to meet his family in another province for the first time! Since the outbreak of the virus coincided with his birth it has been difficult not being able to see any grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins of our baby boy so we finally took the plunge and headed out West to “meet” the family.
Along with the cost of flights etc. this also drove up restaurant, restaurants, alcohol and that sort of thing which we had done a great job of curbing our spending on while at home for the month. These types of expenses are ones that we don’t sweat as they aren’t a regular occurrence but more of a once or twice a year type of thing.
The other life event that drove up a few things on the list was….
WE ARE NOW OFFICIALLY MARRIED!!!
That’s right, Mr. and Mrs. FIC are official.
This happened on a bit of a whim as we had been “planning” a wedding for a while, trying to think about the who, what, where, when and all of the complicated matters that come into these things especially when the two sets of family we have are on opposite sides of the globe. Throw in a global pandemic and we decided to just say “I do” in front of a few close friends in one of our favourite locations. We couldn’t be happier with how things went and I think there’s something to the last minute planning as there wasn’t even enough time for either of us to get nervous about it.
We might make a post breaking down how we threw a budget friendly wedding that we absolutely loved if there’s any demand for that sort of thing.
Let’s take a look at the cashflow:
July’s Cashflow:
Much like last month’s spend report, fortunately we were able to out earn our greater than usual spending. This income isn’t exactly what a normal month looks like for us as it was a 3 pay check month for Mr. FIC and there was a little bit of overtime thrown in. It’s unfortunately looking as though overtime is going to be a common theme at least in small chunks for the rest of 2020 but we’ll try and make the most of it.
For the readers wondering about our “needed” number this is basically an arbitrary number we came up with using a future value calculation trying to figure out how much we’d need to save per month at a given return rate to reach $600k within 5 years time. Getting a big beat on this number will make up for the months where we are likely to miss the goal such as around Christmas time or when we take international vacations again. This is just a target, not something that is a must hit.
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.
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Thanks for stopping by,
FIC.