My plan this year is to do a financial update post once a month to go over my progress (or lack thereof) on my financial goals for 2016. I will include a little summary of my budget/spending for the previous month, since I have stopped sharing my monthly budget and spending like I did last year.
January Spending
Even though I didn’t post this as one of my goals for 2016, I am really hoping that we can keep our monthly spending below last year’s average each month. In computing this average, I didn’t take any of the planned spending in to account (the wedding really would have messed up the average) and I didn’t include our contributions to our RRSPs, which really aren’t expenses. This is just for our regular month-to-month living spending (mortgage, bills, food & drink, etc).
Our average monthly spending last year was about $7700. January was $6000, so success for January. Though to be fair, we did spend a week away, so that cost comes from the travel fund (planned spending) and might have decreased our normal food & drink costs.
Goal #3 – Emergency Fund
I updated my financial goals section on my sidebar yesterday, so my emergency fund status bar is up to date. If you look closely, you’ll see it is at $2500 (exactly where it was at the beginning of the year), which of course means that I haven’t actually put any more in to it since the beginning of the year… So, no progress on this one yet.
Goal #4 – Save for Planned Spending
Last week I posted about how I was making this goal fun using a spread in my bullet journal. Here’s what it looks like now, based on how we allocated money in January.
Also, when I updated my sidebar for the emergency fund, I put a status bar for my planned spending savings too.
Goal #5 – Net Worth & Retirement Savings
Month #1 of tracking our net worth… and what a discouraging month to do it… Our net worth went down (thank you markets), so we made negative progress towards our goal of increasing it by 12%. Instead we went down by over 1%. Not much we can do except keep plugging along… Here’s our updated graph:
Goal #6 – Mortgage Renewal & Account Consolidation
I have done zero towards this very vague goal… but we have some time still… I’m not worried.
How did January treat you? Did you make any progress on your financial goals for 2016?
All-Round Better Me 
I was over budget for January… WHOOPS! ^_^;
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It totally happens… Especially in January. (I went way over budget in January last year!)
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