Canada Nesties
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Budgeting POLL
1. Do you have a budget and/or track expenses?
2. How strictly to you stick to your budget or track expenses?
3. What's the best thing you do to stay on budget?
4. What's the hardest thing about budgeting?
5. How do you handle long-term savings goals? Where do you store this money?
6. What's your fun money strategy?
7. Any other tips, strategies, challenges?
Re: Budgeting POLL
1. Do you have a budget and/or track expenses?
Yes we do have a budget and track expenses
2. How strictly to you stick to your budget or track expenses?
Our budget is not set in stone but is just a guideline. Pretty much every dollar is tracked (I keep a spreadsheet). It really helps to look back at the end of the month and see where you went out of control.
3. What's the best thing you do to stay on budget?
Track our expenses.
4. What's the hardest thing about budgeting?
Tracking the expenses. We do everything on debit and credit so its easy to track but it does take about 10 minutes every morning but I find that its the most important thing to keep us on track.
5. How do you handle long-term savings goals? Where do you store this money?
We have goals in place like being mortgage free in 14 years, travelling and a fund for a baby and less income while on Maternity so we calculated how much we need to achieve these goals and broke it down on a monthly basis. We contribute monthly to an ING account. ING is the best ... you can have as many accounts as you want without any fees and its very user friendly.
6. What's your fun money strategy?
We have an entertainment "fund" of only $200 a month for movies, concerts, dinners, etc. Some months we go over and some months under but we are on a strict budget with the wedding and honeymoon coming up. Plus we set aside $250 a month for travel which I consider fun money.
7. Any other tips, strategies, challenges?
Really, the key I have found is tracking your expenses. If your good in excel create a spreadsheet where you insert your expenses under 6 columns: fixed expenses, food, transportation, other, entertainment, clothing and gifts and then compare it to your salary. It really keeps you honest in your spending.
1. Do you have a budget and/or track expenses?
We have a rough budget, but we don't track it. We kind of just hope we're within it. It seems to work, most of the time. I'd love to track it but I'm just too lazy.
2. How strictly to you stick to your budget or track expenses?
Probably not at all
3. What's the best thing you do to stay on budget?
We generally try to do things as cheap as possible, when possible. For instance we just renovated our living room and we bought some materials from Habitat for Humanity's Restore, which is a store that sells donated building materials to raise money for Habitat for Humanity. We saved quite a bit of money doing that. Also, we noticed that we tended to throw away a lot of produce because we wouldn't eat it fast enough so now we freeze everything- we have bags of frozen broccoli, chopped carrots, spinach, peppers.... nothing goes bad, or to waste, and it makes cooking healthily so much easier when I know I have frozen spinach I can throw into pasta sauces, soups, etc. When cheese goes on sale we buy a ton of it, shred it, and freeze that too (we eat a lot of cheese so this is a big savings).
4. What's the hardest thing about budgeting?
Something unplanned always comes up and ruins the budget- regular expenses like hair cuts or oil changes, or bigger things like new tires or calling the repair guy in to fix the dishwasher that broke. There's always something we didn't plan on.
5. How do you handle long-term savings goals? Where do you store this money?
6% of my husband's gross income is deducted from his paycheque, and goes into company stocks. The company kicks in money as well, as an incentive to buy their stocks. About once a year we sell these stocks and put them into TFSAs. We have an RESP for our son, and kick money into it regularly. We have RRSPs and pensions as well.
6. What's your fun money strategy?
We don't have a set budget for this. We often decide to try to limit ourselves, but it never seems to work. We generally just try to keep it low, but don't worry too too much if we want to do a little something extra. We used to be terrible with spending money, but we've worked hard to discipline ourselves, and we got used to not spending any money at all when my husband was laid off for eight months. We've gotten to the point now where we know when we can afford to spend money and when we can't, and don't track specific dollar amounts.
7. Any other tips, strategies, challenges?
I think the biggest thing that helped us was really to try to be more... I don't know, humble, I guess. We used to spend money like crazy and never worried about it. We owned an apartment in the Vancouver suburbs and we had a really low mortgage because we bought at the perfect time. We knew we had a ton in equity so we didn't worry about savings and we just spent. It was awful. We went out to eat every day, often multiple times a day. We went clothes shopping every weekend and saw every movie that came out. When we bought this place we knew we'd have to seriously cut back because our mortgage was so much more, and then when my husband was laid off we had to eliminate unnecessary spending completely. Those eight months really put our "needs" and "wants" in perspective. Now we're a lot less greedy, I guess. We don't buy things just because we want them, and when we do buy things we really try to shop around, wait for sales, etc. I'm really proud of myself now when I shop around and wait for a great sale, and buy myself something I really wanted for half price. Before I never would have worried about it.
1. Do you have a budget and/or track expenses? Not really. I know roughly how much money i'll need each month to meet the bills but I don't have a strict spending amount.
2. How strictly to you stick to your budget or track expenses? N/A
3. What's the best thing you do to stay on budget? N/A
4. What's the hardest thing about budgeting? I will say the hardest thing about saving is not dipping in there when unexpected things come up. I find that everytime I have a real good amount of money my car will die or i'll get a fat bill for some reason. It sucks.
5. How do you handle long-term savings goals? Where do you store this money? Right now any savings are in my bank account. The Mr. is not so awesome with money so when there's saving to do it's usually up to me.
6. What's your fun money strategy? It varies. When it comes to gas for road trips or hotels we usually go 50/50 though. We also treat each other sometimes since our bank accounts are not combined. Sometimes he'll buy dinner, sometimes I will.
7. Any other tips, strategies, challenges? I find that we are pretty relaxed when it comes to money. Maybe it comes from being in a rental and not having to stress over a mortgage. We do save but we want to live and have fun. So many of our friends are house poor and never travel or go to dinner etc. It may be foolish to be so flip about it but what I have in my bank account does not determine how rich my life it.
Ooh, another tip: try negotiating with companies. I've heard this advice before but I was always afraid to try.
But... we have phone/cable/internet through Shaw. In the past we had Telus, but I hate them. Telus was calling us up all the time, offering us discounts if we switched back, but no discount in the world could make me go back to Telus, so I refused- but I wondered if Shaw would compete. I sent an email to their customer service department (I still felt stupid calling them and asking for a discount), and they called me the next day with a deal. One month free, one month half off, and a year at a reduced monthly fee. It ended up saving us over $400 over the course of a year.
I told my husband, and he got excited about this. He called some other companies we deal with, and although some flat-out refused, some played along. We got better cell phone plans. He ended up calling Shaw again, and they offered him even more than they had offered me- a free digital box, a free upgrade to extreme high speed internet, and free Shaw On Demand, including the cost of the movies. I was shocked, but that saved us a ton of money and gave us better services for free. Score. Shaw rules.
1. Do you have a budget and/or track expenses?
Yes, we have an extensive budget and track all of our expenses.
2. How strictly to you stick to your budget or track expenses?
We are strict with it.
3. What's the best thing you do to stay on budget?
Knowing how much we have to spend on things and planning for everything. Seriously our budget includes everything you can possibly think of.
4. What's the hardest thing about budgeting?
Deciding how much to set aside for certain things and which projects to work on in a year.
5. How do you handle long-term savings goals? Where do you store this money?
We both have several RRSP's and we also have a savings account. Each pay money in our budget is set aside for savings. It is either short term (say vacation, house project) or long term.
6. What's your fun money strategy?
We both get an allowance each pay. We can do whatever we want with it.
7. Any other tips, strategies, challenges?
We add up what our total income is each month for the coming year and then determine the fixed costs (the things we can not change). It is more than just insurance, cars, mortgage. It is everything that is constant in the month that we consider part of our living expenses (even hair cuts are fixed because they are needed). What is left over after all fixed costs are budgeted is our variable expenses. That is broken up into our list of variable budget items (ie: gifts, eating out, vacations). Money is put into each category based on what is leftover from the fixed costs.
House projects are listed in the variable expenses. At the start of every year when we are doing our budget for the year we decided which project we will do and when. We set a project budget and fit it into our overall budget.