It’s November, and I’m just writing about August now. Truthfully the last few months (August in particular) have been challenging and I haven’t wanted to look back on it in much detail. In mid-August we were evacuated from our home due to a nearby wildfire. We were supposed to be going on a short roadtrip the following week to be with family and celebrate my mom’s birthday so we decided to head there early anyways. We stayed with family, and within a day or two of getting there we learned we had covid. We spent an entire week evacuated and pretty much isolated, unable to spend any quality time with family or friends while also hoping we didn’t bring covid down to our family (thankfully no one got it from us). Most of the days and a lot of the night was spent watching our neighbourhood Facebook groups for fire updates. Us, and many of our neighbours have security cameras which provided the daily confirmation that our house was still standing. After a week of being evacuated we were allowed to return home and were grateful we had a home to return to. Hundreds of neighbours were not so lucky. While returning home was a beautiful moment and such a relief, seeing the burnt out forests and parks and destroyed homes near us was heart-wrenching. It was a week I’ll never forget.

How did we spend our $$…

Mortgage: $2,268: This amount includes both principal and interest. We are on an accelerated biweekly payment plan.

Food – $2,217: Ugh. We spent $1,149 on groceries in August, which is fairly average for us. But we also spent $1,027 on restaurants and take-out. Turns out when you’re evacuated, and isolated with covid in a home where no one is around to make you food, you order a lot of take-out. This sucked, but is also one of those ‘is what it is’ moments. I probably could have been better at having groceries delivered and making more food but it was just an awkward and not ideal situation all around.

Rental Condo – $2,140: We have two mortgages against our rental condo. We took out a second one in 2021 to help us with the down payment on our primary residence. So technically some of this amount is actually related to our home but I still keep it under the rental condo because if we ever sell it we’ll be able to wipe the entire rental condo mortgage out. This also includes the property manager fee and strata.

Daycare – $1,499: We pay for one of the most expensive daycare options in our city because it was the only one we could get into. We are very very fortunate to be able to afford this.

Vehicle – $1,255: Well, our car payments started this month. I still want to do a car post one of these days but our car payment is $362.63 per month. We also spent $325 insuring our other car for 3 months so that we could list it for sale. We spent $451 on gas. Turns out the new car is a bit of a gas guzzler – at least that is the opinion of someone who has only ever had small sedans. The remainder was spent on a couple small purchases and parking.

House Stuff – $1,172: This category includes anything house-related aside from mortgage payments and utilities. The majority of this ($966) was to have our AC fixed… again… This was a super frustrating expense.

Vacation & Travels – $1,164: Remember how I said the last few months sucked. This amount was for an AirBnB for a trip we were supposed to take in September that didn’t happen. Thankfully this was refunded in September.

Utilities – $505: We pay for Gas (monthly) – $38, Electricity (bi-monthly) – $0, and Water (quarterly) – $467.

Health – $475: It’s that time of year when benefits run out… this was for a couple of therapy sessions.

Dog – $149: Dog Food & Insurance. Yes we pay for dog insurance. No, I don’t know if we should be. However if we have a $10,000 decision to make with our dog one day. I don’t want to have to think twice.

FREE GROCERIES: We didn’t redeem any free groceries in August. YTD we’ve redeemed $500.

Investments: We didn’t make any investments in August. We also contribute to an RESP for our child but I don’t include that in our Investment balances.

Our Retirement Assets number is calculated as: Cash + Condo Value + Investments – Mortgages – Credit Card Balance. I do not take into consideration the value of, or any equity in our home. It went down in July due to the large down payment we made on our car.