August 2016 Financial Update

The beginning of a new month always sneaks up on me.  How does time go by so quickly?!?

Anyway, here we are at the beginning of August, so it is time once again to go over where we stand financially and check in with my financial goals for 2016.

July Spending

Can I just skip this section of the post?  I don’t really want to admit how much we spent this month… I thought that last month was bad… And we beat that one by a fair margin…

Okay, if I can’t skip this portion of the post, I best just get on with it.  The goal that I made at the beginning of the year was to keep our monthly spending below the average of last year, which was $7700 per month.  This includes our mortgage, utilities and normal monthly costs, but didn’t count special spending that we saved up for (planned spending as I call it).  This month we came in at $8500.

So, what did we spend all that money on?  Well, a variety of things that we had been putting off were purchased this month… We stocked up on some stuff that we only buy every few months… And there were a few birthdays this month (mine included), so there was quite a bit spent on gifts.  Oh, and a decent chunk was spent on something that I will be announcing here on the blog next week.  So, nothing was really too crazy, and I don’t feel bad about any one category or anything, it was just a spendy month.

It was even spendy compared to July 2015.  The total for July 2015 was $8100.  So we even beat that one out with this July.  All we can do now is work on spending less for August and the rest of the year.

And now for a quick recap of my finance-related goals for 2016:

Goal #3 – Emergency Fund

A big success on this front… I got a bonus at work, and with my husband having a 3 paycheck month and me working some overtime, we were able to increase our emergency fund to $7000.  Only $3000 left to go on this one!

Goal #4 – Save for Planned Spending

As I mentioned above, we had a bit of extra income this month, so we were able to save a bit more for our planned spending too.  But we also spent some of our planned spending on various home improvements, and I bought some of the flights for our travels in the fall.

For our travel fund, I think we have about $3000 left to save for our travels this year.  And for the home renos, we have about $5500 left to save.  The dog fund is filled up, to the remaining other goal will be what we stretch for once we get the other savings goals done.  With 5 months remaining in 2016, I’m pretty sure we can save about $2000 per month, so these goals are looking pretty darn good!

Goal #5 – Net Worth & Retirement Savings

We made some good progress this month on the net worth side of things, but that is mostly because of favourable markets and the planned savings that we haven’t spent yet…  So I expect that next month we will go down, but not too worried about it right now.

Technically, we have met my goal for total net worth, but since the distribution is totally wrong, it won’t stay that way and I don’t consider that goal met… Once we spend most of the planned spending money that is held in the “cash savings” portion of our net worth, I expect us to be much lower… The big one that hasn’t grown at all and needs some attention is our TFSA.  It’s only at 2% and the goal is 9%.  It’s not totally our fault though… There was a mix-up and automatic contributions were supposed to start on that one, but didn’t… so hopefully that will be sorted out before next update.

Goal #6 – Mortgage Renewal & Account Consolidation

Last month I had no update on this goal… And this month I also have no update on this goal… Oh, but I did send off for my credit report, and I had that as a part of the process for preparing for our mortgage renewal, so something was at least started on that front.  Next month I promise to have an update on this.

How did your July go financially?  Are you enjoying the upturn in the markets?