Hello all, and welcome back for another breakdown of our monthly expenses.
September was a great month for us! I had a chance to finally take time away from work for the first time since the birth of our son and we were able to use this time to get away for a vacation.
We also took the time we were gone to have work done on our house that we’d been putting off for some time now.
While the month was great on our spirits… it was not “great” on our pocket books. So we’ll get into just how bad it was down below.
September’s Spend
Yep, you’re reading that right. For the month of September we ended up spending over $12,000.
That’s definitely not a sum that we would necessarily expect especially given that we do still consider ourselves to be “frugal” and very interested in the early retirement community.
For our vacation we decided to just take off in the vehicle as a family and explore the surrounding areas. We ended up totalling just over 3,000km and over 30 hours of total driving but we did make some great memories and wouldn’t change a thing. With this trip we ended up racking up a fair bit of fuel expenses and hotel stays as is reflected above under the auto and travel headings.
The largest hitter for the month ended up falling under “misc.” – this does include a bit of a mashup of smaller items that don’t deserve their own heading but the reason for it being so high is this month we had contractors come in and do a fair bit of work on our house such as painting, some dry wall repairs etc. These are hopefully going to be reflected when we sell our house some day but even if they’re not we’re a lot happier with the spaces they were working on now that they are how we envisioned them when we bought our home a few years back.
September’s Cashflow
The goal when we headed out this past month, and also had the work done to our house was to not worry about the cost and just enjoy ourselves and get the changes we wanted done, done so that it wouldn’t have to be revisited down the line.
While we did accomplish that goal, I was still nervous when it came time to tally up the damage we’d inflicted upon ourselves financially and I’ll admit I did breathe a sigh of relief when I saw that we were still cash flow positive for the month.
Our goal is still to have a buffer of about $6,350/month and we came up over $5,000 short of that goal but a green month is still a green month.
For those of you curious, yes we do keep track of how the year is going and we’re still sitting at above our total goal:
All that is showing is that since we’ve started tracking our spending we’ve been able to reach our cashflow goals on 4 occasions and missed 2 times. Overall we are still $1,350.21 above and beyond what our target savings are so we’re in good shape for the year provided we don’t have any large unexpected expenses between now and years end.
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.