Findependence Canada

Finding financial independence from scratch

Monthly Spend Report – October 2020 (Better than we thought)

Welcome back to FindependenceCanada, today we’re welcoming you to another one of our spending reports where we break down our income and expenses for a given month.

Today’s breakdown will be for October which was a pretty slow moving month all in all with the exception of our Canadian Thanksgiving that ran us a little more than our usual grocery bill.

Let’s start as we usually do – with the spend.

October’s Spend:

A spend of $6,657.74 is a very reasonable number for us, heading into this whole tracking experiment I never thought that our spend would be so high but now that we’ve been tracking for over a half of a year this is what we’ll come to expect.

As you can see our mortgage is high compared to most of Canada and coupled with our insurances it does make up nearly half of our overall expense. When we start planning life after Northern Canada this is the number that we look to when we expect our living expenses will be much lower than today’s numbers.

Spending over $1,100 in groceries for a month is also very high, when I think back to my days as a bachelor spending maybe $300 a month it’s amazing to think of how much this has grown. Thankfully along with the increase in spending it has led to much more tasty dishes served and much better lunches for work all of which make for a fair trade.

We did spend an extra couple hundred dollars to host Thanksgiving as well that won’t be a recurring expense either.

Now for the most important numbers, let’s have a look at cashflow.

October’s Cashflow:

I call this the “most important” because I feel like our cashflow left over at the end of the month is the result needed to get to our goals. The income and spend are just the levers we’re pulling to try and get to our end goals.

$13,688 is a strong month of income and is right in line with our normal months assuming no overtime or extras factored in so that didn’t leave us any room to really splurge on the expenses side – which is where we were frugal enough to end up meeting our goal of $6,350 left over at the month’s end.

Our random goal we set out for ourselves was $6,350 or $57,150 from April through years end (the term we’ve been tracking) and thus far we have actually managed to save up $44,525 which leaves us $2,031 ahead of our needed pace!

On top of this cashflow we also earn ourselves roughly $9,000 per year in dividends and have begun using covered calls to further boost our income streams, these won’t ever be counted in these updates – at least not until they’re actually being used as a source of income to cover expenses with.

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.

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Thanks for stopping by,

FIC.