March 2018 – Financial Update

Time is just flying by.  I can’t believe that it is March already, and that I am 3 weeks away from my due date… I am so not ready for a baby!!

Anyway… it is once again time to do a quick check-in on the finances to see if I’m on track to meet my financial goals for 2018.

Goal #1 – Emergency Fund

Ugh… That’s all I have to say… ugh…

Human Emergency Fund: $0 (-$4240)

Pet Emergency Fund: $4165 (+$470)

I drained the human emergency fund to pay for some outstanding renovation costs… So that is literally sitting at zero at the moment… These last few clean-up items on the renovations are sure taking a long time and costing a pretty penny…

I was able to add a bit to the pet emergency fund though, so it wasn’t a complete loss…

And yes, I realize it doesn’t quite make sense to take from one emergency fund and contribute to another… It really is just one big savings goal, but that’s the way I have it tracked in YNAB right now, so that’s how I am reporting it to you.

It will be interesting to see if I can turn this around before I head on maternity leave… (I can hear you all laughing at me… I know, I know…)

Goal #2 – Maternity Leave Fund

Speaking of maternity leave…

Last month I updated the plan for my maternity leave savings to be this:

1. Save $400 for Baby Fund in January
2. Save $1600 for Baby Fund in February
3. Save $1500 for Baby Fund in March

However, I stole from the baby fund for renovations costs, so… the plan now looks like this:

1. Save $400 for Baby Fund in January
2. Steal $3200 from Baby Fund in February
3. Save $6300 for Baby Fund in March

I am not so confident that we will be able to save that much this month, so we will likely have to re-evaluate things… And we will definitely have to live on a tight budget for the next few months… Here’s hoping that my husband’s training finishes up soon and he gets to start full time work and increase his income.

Goal #3 – Monthly Spending

This was a two part goal… the first was to review 2 budget categories each month to see how we could decrease our spending… the second was to keep each month below the average of the same month the 2 years previous…

1. I did not review any of our budget categories this month.  I actually totally forgot about this part of the goal until I started writing this post, so I will try to catch up by reviewing 4 budget categories this month.
2. February has a history of being a spendy month, since we typically have annual vet bills, and we also renew our home insurance.  This February was no different… but let’s compare…
   February 2016 total spending was about $9300.
   February 2017 total spending was about $9000.
   The average of those two would give me $9150.
   So what was February 2018’s total spending?  About $8500.
   What?!?  I guess this is what happens when you spend all your money on renovations that fall under “planned spending” even when they are actually totally coming out of reserve funds meant for something else…
   So, Success!

Goal #4 – Save for California Road Trip

I originally split this goal in to 3 steps.  I went over the budget for this trip in my last post.  So I did the first step of this goal!  Success!

Now to put together a plan to save this money in the next 6 months… While on maternity leave… Hmmm…

Goal #5 – Maintain Net Worth

Since I am now home from my work trip, I was able to spend some time updating out net worth spreadsheet, and I was surprised to see that it wasn’t doing so bad… I don’t believe the numbers for February (that show an increase) since I wasn’t actually able to get exact values, so some of the numbers are estimates that might be a little high… But let’s just concentrate on the March values.

Our RRSP values are up, and now represent 76% of our total.  Getting closer to the goal of 84%.  Our TFSA values are also up, and now represent 6% of our total (the goal is 8%).  I think both of those increases are due to our contributions, not any favours from the market…  Our cash savings are down (as you probably guessed already by the lack of emergency fund and stealing from the baby fund), and now represent 15% of our total.  Our goal for that is to be at about 6%, but that was taking in to account the spending over my maternity leave… So being on our way there early isn’t exactly good… And finally, our taxable investments are actually down this month, but I don’t really expect that to be an issue.  I don’t do any contributions to those at the moment, so we are just riding the markets with those… Anyway, the end result is that we are down… Hopefully we can stay around this value without decreasing too much more while I am on maternity leave and then make up for it when I’m back at work in the fall…

How was February for everyone else?  Did you make progress on your financial goals?

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