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You are here: Home / Archives for Home and Lifestyle / Finance

Do you stick to a budget?

January 4, 2010 by Tricia

It’s bad enough that the holiday season usually incurs higher expenses for most households what with buying gifts for kids, family and friends, but when your husband is on rolling lay-offs or someone’s out of work it gets tough to keep track of expenses and stick to a budget.

I’ve been off work for five years now thanks to a nasty Crohn’s disease flare that just won’t calm down. I used to get medical leave pay and benefits, but that ran out a few years ago, so now I’m dependent upon what income I can make on the internet.

My husband on the other hand works in the same hospital where I’m employed (yes I still have a job, I just haven’t been there for years!), but due to the hospital going over budget they’ve decided that his department must go through five or six weeks of shut down. He just completed the first two weeks of temporary lay off and is on his first day back to work. The next scheduled lay off is in March and the last in July. Once he’s accumulated enough time off work he’ll get some unemployment insurance money, but it won’t come near to what he would have made had he been working his regular hours.

So … we’re on a budget! A tight one.

My husband will get a paycheck this week but I believe that it will be for zero dollars as he didn’t work the last two weeks thanks to the lay off, so the next real paycheck we can count on from him is January 20th! That’s a long wait!

So over the weekend I spent some time working on a budget for the next month. I added up what money we each have in the bank, cash on hand, and money that we expect to come in between now and the end of the month. I then totaled all of our upcoming bills, like our biweekly mortgage payments, the monthly oil bill, house and life insurance payments, cable and telephone and so on.

The hard part about creating a budget is working out expenses that can be variable, like the grocery bill. We have a lot of food in the house right now so I think we can get by just buying the basics like milk, bread and some fresh veggies and fruit over the next two weeks, but after that our weekly grocery expenses will probably go up.

As it turns out, if we stick to the budget that I created, we should have money to spare at the end of the month. A nice chunk too – more than I thought we’d have!

One great thing about adding up your weekly or monthly expenses is that you can see where you waste money as well. Just before we bought our house in 2001 I kept track of every cent we spent – you know, stopping off at the corner store on your way home, buying a coffee each morning, buying lunch during the work week etc. At that time it turned out that we wasted a lot of money by not bringing lunch to work or buying a coffee in the morning and a soft drink or juice in the afternoon – not to mention buying the occasional chocolate bar, snack or magazine at the corner store on the way home from work. We changed our ways and stop spending money on little extras that we could bring from home or make at home and it saved us literally hundreds of dollars a month.

Do you make a monthly budget and try to stick to it? Are you successful at sticking to your budget or do you blow it most of the time?





Filed Under: Crohns Disease, Family, Finance, Health Fitness + Beauty, Home and Lifestyle, Items to Try, Life with Chris Tagged With: bills, budget, careful, finances, grocery, lay off, limited income, monthly expenses, planning, rolling lay offs, spending

I hate all the bills at this time of year

December 29, 2009 by Tricia

I was just saying on my other blog how expensive this holiday season has been for us. I think this is just about the most expensive time of year for a lot of people … it certainly is for us! Our next most expensive time of year is usually May or early June as we’re buying plants, seeds and other items for our garden.

What’s your most expensive time of year? Do you just dread watching the barcode scanner go over your items and tally up the total? I know I do!

At least this year we didn’t use the credit card for any of our purchases so I won’t get a scary bill in January. Ok … I will … I still have to do my nurses registration online before the 1st of January and I think that will be on January’s bill … maybe February’s if we’re lucky. LOL

Filed Under: Finance, Home and Lifestyle, Items to Try, Toronto Tagged With: ahhh, bills, buying, cash register, credit card bill, expenses, expensive time of year, holiday season, Shopping, tally

Trying to save money but I can’t cut any more expenses

October 3, 2009 by Tricia

My husband and I have been going through some rough financial times lately so we’re working hard to cut our bills. I listed a few ways that we’re cutting our expenses on my other blog if you’d care to take a look. Perhaps our list of things we’re doing to save money might help you out!

In my quest to find ways to save money I spent some time this week in the hopes of finding the best term insurance quotes while I was at it I was also looking for good prices on home and car insurance as well. As it turns out we have pretty good rates with the company that we’ve been using for the last ten years or so … so I guess I can’t cut our bills that way!

I don’t think there’s any other things that I can cut to save money. Any ideas?

Filed Under: Finance, Home and Lifestyle, Items to Try, Toronto Tagged With: bills, cut expenses, finances, insurance, save money

Time to go over the bills

February 12, 2009 by Tricia

I’m dreading going over the bills that are due. With Chris having been sick and off work for a week we’re going to have less money this month. You see Chris is only Part time at the hospital – oh he works full time hours and gets a percentage added on top in lieu of benefits, but because he’s part time he didn’t get any sick pay for his time off.

So … in a little while I’ll be pulling out the gas, telephone, cable, electricity, house and car insurance bills and be going over them. Some are due now and others are due near the end of the month.

I do like to stay on top of our bills. Back when we lived in an apartment I was horrible about paying bills. We were always behind. It wasn’t like we didn’t have the money – I just hated paying the bills. Dumb eh? Now that we have our house I always pay the bills on time … unless we’re in a financial crunch. We’ve only been a little behind of bills once or twice. Hopefully this isn’t going to be one of those times.

Do you pay all of your bills on time? Do you dread bills when you’ve had a set back like a spouse being sick and having less income for a short while?

Filed Under: Finance, Items to Try Tagged With: bills, cable, electric, finances, insurance, money, no_money, sick_pay, telephone, week_off

Is it wrong that I’m happy the Canadian dollar is dropping?

October 30, 2008 by Tricia

Is it WRONG that I’m sitting here hoping that our Canadian dollar will fall a little bit more? Probably …

I know it’s not very good if our dollar really drops as it will eventually cost more for items imported into Canada and forget taking a holiday anywhere, but … I get paid in US dollars for the most part, so our dollar being lower than the US dollar is a good thing for me.

A few days ago our dollar really dropped and it was at about 79 cents US. At that time I did some calculations on money I’m expected to be paid on November 1st and if our dollar had stayed that low I would have walked away with about $400 extra bucks in my pocket. However, our dollar started rising again on Wednesday and now it’s getting close to 82 cents. I’ll still make a profit, but not quite as much.

Around this time last year our dollar was higher than the US dollar. Last November when we went to Vegas our dollar was worth 1.12 US. That was good for us spending wise in the US, but again, since I mostly get paid in US dollars I was losing money when it was converted to Canadian.

Any other Canadians getting paid in US dollars who are kind of happy that our dollar has dropped a bit?

Filed Under: Canada, Culture, Finance, Home and Lifestyle Tagged With: Canada, Canadian, Canadian _dollar, Canadian_dollar_droppingm paid_in_US_funds, economy, making_money, money, profit, Us_dollar

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