Retirement Milestone

I dislike the beginning of the month. Or at least until the mortgage goes thru the account: then I’m good. We planned this month just perfectly though. I got paid on Friday but nearly 50% of my pay cheque goes to savings so I had to do some calculating and we will have $3.70 Tuesday night after the mortgage and house insurance goes thru. nervous laughter…Talk about the skin of our teeth! Wednesday G gets paid so we won’t even notice that sad number in our account.  We do have an overdraft on our account but I really hate using it. I’m glad to say we haven’t in over a year now that we are tracking our spending and have a shared iCalendar with the dates of all our bills and automatic payments. It’s literally paying off to be organized with our finances. J

            Speaking of organizing our finances: I have official crossed the $5000 mark in my retirement accounts ($5043.15 to be exact)! I have my retirement savings in a TFSA, which I opened in January and a Spousal-RRSP mutual fund, that we opened mid-April. I’m excited for next year to see what kind of headway I can make investing for an entire year. I’m aiming for $15,000 in the accounts, give or take with the markets I definitely think it’s do-able. Either way I’m very excited and proud. We all have to start somewhere!

            Okay, the last bit of good news. The company I work for had their fiscal year end October 31^st, so in December there is always the possibility of a raise and/or bonus. This year I got both! The raise was only ten cents (lol) but at least it’s better than nothing, but my bonus surprised me quite a bit. $1,125! That is nearly two paycheques for me so I was extremely pleased. This is before taxes of course but what ever is deposited will go straight to our debt. Originally I wanted to split it half TFSA, half debt but after G and I talked it over with both agreed the sooner we could have the LOC gone the better. But I also asked that once we have everything taken care of and he gets an overtime payment that isn’t going to debt if I can make a $600 deposit into my TFSA to make up for my bonus, which he said yes of course.  So I’m happy with that.

            I’ll be watching these last few pay cheques for G very carefully. If he doesn’t get any overtime payment he will stay in the lower tax bracket but if he gets any payout it’s going to be extremely close. We do have my RRSP he can claim to help but we may have to allocate more if this happens just to help him get back to the lower bracket. Sorry taxman, I’m not going to let this one pass me now that I know what I’m doing and looking for. It's all about dat planning ;) 

- M