April was spendy. We got our taxes done – which means we paid someone a gazillion dollars to do it for us. Because we worked in both Canada and the US in 2020 there’s just no way we could have figured out ourselves how to file our returns. We had to file 7 returns total between the two of us – ugh. Luckily we received part of our tax return for the year which helped to offset the cost and our savings rate was still 27%.
What Happened This Month?
So how much did we pay someone to do our taxes? $3,400 CAD. Yuck. This was a crappy expense but a bit of a necessity for us. Doing taxes in multiple countries is incredibly complicated if you don’t know what you’re doing and we need to get them done so we’re not left with much of a choice. I’m also very happy with who we chose to do them for us and trust they were done correctly. Thankfully our tax refunds will cover the bill but we haven’t received all of them yet. We did receive $2,325 in April for one of our refunds which I recorded as income.
Expenses Breakdown:
Food: $888. Just under $400 of this was groceries which is pretty good for us. The remainder is for Take-Out, Coffee Shops and… alcohol. I’ll never get over alcohol prices in Canada. They’re criminal. We went to a winery and a cidery in April, and we also bought a big bottle of Tito’s which we looked up and was about twice the price as the US price.
Home Expenses: $1,661. This is a bit skewed as we had to pay for both home insurance ($1,231) on the house we’re moving into at the beginning of June, as well as renew our renters insurance ($240). Some of the renters insurance will be refunded when we move out.
Transportation: $235. An expense I didn’t think about when we moved to a city with real weather – semi-annual tire changes. $145 of this was just the labour to switch from winter tires to summer tires.
Other: $3,742. This is mostly made up of the awful tax bill mentioned above.
Dog: $1,333. A new category I had to add in since we brought a puppy home the first weekend of May. $500 of this was the deposit we paid for the dog and the rest is for all the shit we needed to get set up – dog food, crates, treats, toys etc etc etc. Dogs are expensive and I talk a bit about that here.
Cash-Back: This month we earned $30 towards free groceries with our PC Financial Mastercard. I mentioned last month that I’ve started tracking this amount each month because we seem to cash in on free groceries every month and this is a completely free card to use.
