What I expected to happen in July, happened in August. Our Net Worth took a bit of a dip this month – though still not too bad considering we had negative cash flow of $4,456. I also actually had some income this month – first time since March! I did some contract work this Summer so that money is starting to trickle in which is nice.

So how did we do?

One thing that really sucked this month is we actually “lost” value in our cash because a portion of our cash is held in USD. We’ve slowly been moving it over but didn’t move any in August. The exchange rate went from 1.34 at the end of July to 1.30 in August which caused about a $2,000 “loss.” Lame. Oh and fun fact – it was 1.45 on Mar 19. Did we move money then? No.. no we didn’t.

Anyways.

Our biggest expense category this month was transportation. Cars make me angry. We imported our car into Canada in August which means we had to get it inspected ($148) and pay for a bunch of “repairs” before they’d sign off on it ($677) – including front window tint removal.
We then also had to insure it (~$1,548). That amount is for the year and only for pleasure driving. If we get jobs we commute to it’ll go up. Some parts of Canada suck.
AND we also had to pay $75 each for new drivers licenses. It feels like every month there’s something. Next month it’s winter tires.

In my last NW post I said my August goal was to get our groceries down. We spent over $700 in July and I’m happy to say we kept it to $540 in August. I’d still like to get this under $500 but it seems to be really hard. We don’t shop at the fancy grocery stores either so I need to learn how to optimize our grocery shopping.

In September we’ll officially start to job-hunt – so hopefully by the end of this year we’ll be employed and the net worth will start tracking upwards again.