Greetings all, welcome back for another monthly spend report.
The spend report we did in April was well received so we’ve decided to go ahead and do another this month. If you want to check that report click here.
This month’s spend was a little more eye opening than the last as a couple of our budget lines went far above where we expected them to be.
Here’s a look at our entire month of May spend:
May’s spend:
The utility bill was way up over April, that’s due to the fact that our water bill from the city is charged every second month so this will be a trend going forward.
The other surprising totals were the overall food consumption for our household coming in well over $1,000 for a single month – something will have to be done to address this number as it’s just too high.
The groceries we’d like to see much lower from $800 hopefully closer to $500 moving forward but that may not be feasible. The restaurants being over $300 is also way too much, we’d like to cut that back to under $200.
As we mentioned last month there were a couple larger expenses in the vehicle department so we were able to drop our spend in that category significantly this month.
Other than that everything remained about the same.
A new little tac on we’ll have here is our income and overall cashflow for the household in the month. This takes into account contributions to our retirement accounts as well as actual cash received in the form of pay checks.
May’s Cashflow:
This should be pretty straight forward, the cashflow is our income minus expenses, “needed” is our target that we’d like to have in overall contributions through savings, TFSAs, RRSPs, Pension, Savings plan etc.
If that needed mark is hit each month then we know we’re on track for where we want to be to reach our long term goals.
May we came in better than needed but this is necessary to make up for the months when we decide to have vacations, home repairs and those sorts of things where we will fall well shy of our mark.
The goal of our investing accounts is to be able to replicate a $4,000 income per month, that’s the point where we would consider ourselves “lean fire” as we feel we can cut our expenses to about that figure once we leave the inflated area we live in currently.
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.