Busy Weekend - Busy Month

G made it home last Thursday, no issues or delays. I was able to move my lunch around at work to go pick him up from the airport. Although his work will pay for his car to be parked at the airport, three weeks seemed like a lot of time for his car to be parked there, especially with some of the hail storms we’ve been having. I’m lucky that my work is flexible, even during quarter end reporting crunch.

We didn’t have much time to ourselves as we hosted some friends from out of town on Saturday and Sunday. My work had Roughrider tickets (CFL) they were giving away and I was able to snag 4 of them! So we were able to treat them to a game & in turn, our friends treated us to dinner out, which was completely unexpected and very generous. We did a bit of shopping to have some special items for breakfast, snacks, and non-alcoholic drinks (the one friend is pregnant). Then some BBQ items for after the game, but all those will come out of our hosting sinking fund. Game was fun: Saskatchewan won, but it was ungodly hot. Like heat I haven’t experienced since moving out to Saskatchewan. I couldn’t even finish my cider, I just kept chugging water. We were in the shade, but I honestly don’t know how my pregnant friend did it because I was dying lol.

In classic us fashion we overbought and prepared way too much food (we always do this when hosting, but I’d rather make too much than not enough) - so we’ve been having hot dogs and hamburgers all week. We just finished the last of them today. I had made a mediterranean dip, which we have a lot of left over, so I took out some chicken to marinate in it tomorrow during the day and then we can have that for dinner. There is a lot of lettuce in the garden currently, so I may make a salad to go with.

Saturday we head out to a friend’s house a few hours away to celebrate their daughter’s 1st birthday. They offered to let us stay the night so we may take them up on that offer. Next weekend another friend is going to be in the city, so we are hosting them for dinner. Planning on making some homemade burgers and a pasta salad with our homemade pesto or possibly some pesto-lemon rice. I’ll see what I’m inspired to make. I love summer for all the socializing, especially because summer is so short in Saskatchewan. However, we are pretty lucky that our group of friends gets together often and even as their families expand, they still make getting together a priority. This is also why it’s important for us to have a hosting fund, lol.

Tomorrow is my payday. I looked at our credit card balances, upcoming bills and how much G will get paid next week and feel comfortable we can pay all the bills/credit cards with his pay cheque alone so I will allocate my entire pay to our B.C. trip fund. I’ll move $1,900: leaving us with a balance of $370 to save. I have a preauth of $200 already baked into the budget, so we only have to save $170. This is a three paycheque month for me, so saving the rest of this will be no issue. Glad to have this chunk of money saved before we go on vacation! There’s no better freedom than actually enjoying your vacation without any worry.

- M

Hosting & Money Moves

Yesterday was the first day in over a week that we didn’t have some sort of rain or thunderstorm. In the morning I went out to the yard after my morning coffee to see how things are looking. The plants loved all the rain because things were popping off. I was able to get a second harvest of parsley & a huge amount of arugula. The parsley I cleaned and froze. Later this week I’ll run them thru our freeze drier to store in our pantry for the winter. Today I picked my first round of basil and made pesto. I freeze pesto in ice cube trays and have pesto blocks I can easily grab from the freezer. I’m near the end of my pesto stores from last year so this is perfect to replenish. My tomatoes, zucchini, herbs, peas & beans are all doing extremely well this year. My peppers: not so much. Last year we had an amazing pepper harvest though, so we did scale back the amount of plants - but I’m wondering if they were stunted early in the season with some cooler nights. I’ll keep watching and see what happens. G makes his own hot sauces with these, so I’m hoping we can get a few peppers at least.

As mentioned in my last post, last night I hosted a girls evening which turned into a girls early early morning by the time everyone went home, lol. With G gone it was nice to have people over and enjoy the nice evening outside on the deck. You know you are in good company when someone looks at the clock on the wall and realizes how late it is. For appetizers I made a garlic focaccia bread: Link and black lentil ‘caviar’: Link. All ingredients I had on hand, just required planning ahead in the case of the focaccia. My neighbour made a Mediterranean dip: which was delicious!

I was paid on Friday, and after looking at our finances, what we had still in our chequing account and what was upcoming this week, I was able to move the entire amount into our vacation fund for B.C.: $3,130 in total. This paycheque was much higher than usual because I was able to negotiate a signing bonus with a recent promotion I took. I’m interested to see what my regular pay cheques will be going forward now. I’ll find out later this month.

G calculated roughly how much his expense refund will be when he gets back from Vancouver: $2,900ish. We’ve been paying his credit card as charges have been applied and still been able to keep up with our other bills, so this amount can be completely directed towards saving goals. There is also the question regarding how much overtime he was able to work during the deployment - so at some point that will get paid out as he cannot bank those hours. Although sometimes the delay on these payouts can be months, so we’ve learnt to not count on these.

For dinner I made a batch of Vietnamese-Style meatballs. The recipe (link) calls for half pork, half ground beef - but we have so much ground beef in the freezer I opted to use all beef. Everything else for the recipe I had on hand in the pantry. Very easy prep and I will absolutely make these again. I had pairs them with some veggie potstickers from in the freezer and made a bowl with edamame, cucumbers, pickled onions, shredded carrots and sesame sauce drizzled on top.

Count down until G comes home: 4 days.

July Goals

1. Groceries under $250 - while G’s been gone to Vancouver I inventoried our freezers and pantry. I have everything on a printed out list and cross things off as I’ve used them. It’s extremely easy to reference the list and come up with meal ideas or figure out what ingredients I want to use and look for a recipe that uses those things. Wednesday I made chicken fajitas (using up chicken breast, onions, two bell peppers, fajita spice was mixed from pantry spices, wraps, cheddar cheese, and black bean soup (homemade from freezer). I was able to portion these out into 4 different meals. I’m hosting some neighbours and friends from the city over for drinks Saturday evening, so I’ll make some sort of appetizer getting creative with what we have on hand.
2. Save 80% of the cost for British Columbia trip - we are currently 30% of the way there and I don’t think the 80% will be an issue. Stretch goal is to fund this completely.
3. Fully fund Christmas sinking fund - I just want this finished.
4. One date night - Normally I would try to make this two, but we have a few social things planned this month. I would love to see the Odyssey!
5. Read three books from my physical TBR.
6. Continue to track macros - Specifically watching my fibre and protein.
7. Finish TFSA spreadsheets - This is for keeping track of our contribution room (I reference my spreadsheet to the CRA to ensure things are reporting correctly) and year end market values to keep track of gains (not only for the year, but for the entire time we’ve been contributing). It’s easy to narrow your field of vision and see how well your portfolio is doing during the good years but I have fond memories when the markets weren’t doing too hot.
8. Finish Networth spreadsheet - I have all our networth numbers spread across multiple journals, budget spreadsheets, notebooks. I want to consolidate these into a single excel spreadsheet.
9. Call life insurance company - I just need to call to update our address. I don’t know why I keep putting this off. This is my not so fun task this month lol.
10. Book a massage - I haven’t used any of my massage benefits at work this year.

Me Again

Long time no post. 

I’m not even sure if anyone still reads blogs but I’ve missed it. To be honest, this isn’t about who is reading these posts or gaining an audience, it’s about capturing all the frantic thoughts that are going on in my head. I’m of the generation who had LiveJournal during my angsty teenage years, and I love looking back to see how in my feelings I was, lol. It’s similar to this blog, reading my earlier posts about just starting our investing journey, couponing, excitedly seeing our net worth grow slowly. I’m proud of us and how far we’ve come. It’s also kind of weird, because when I think about it all it doesn’t seem like that long ago.

Anyways, cole’s notes from the last few years:

G & I are still together and celebrated our 19 year together (14 of marriage). G had another transfer a few years ago, so we sold our house and moved to a small town just outside a large city in Saskatchewan (yes - I’m still Saskatchewan Savings! :) ). We looked at moving into the city but my heart just loves the small town vibes where neighbours actually talk to one another and have get togethers often. We love it here, it’s been a really good move for us. 

With that also came a big change in my job. The Credit Union I worked for didn’t offer remote work, so as soon as we had our transfer notice I let them know I had to move and if we could work something out, let me know - if not, no hard feelings. Turns out, they wanted to keep me! And they pushed thru an entirely brand new remote work policy for me, and have since rolled it out to other employees as well. I’m such a trend setter ;)  Our new house has enough bedrooms that I have a dedicated office space set up and only have to go into head office 10% of my working days annually. Oh, and they put me in an entirely new department: finance! I LOVE this job, it’s super changing but rewarding. Seeing how the back end of the Credit Union works is fascinating. The team I work with is great as well, I’m learning a lot. It is extremely busy at work at the moment which has bled into my personal life. It’s is honestly why I think I’ve missed journaling… It’s just nice to get all my crazy thoughts down and process.

Something else I should mentioned is G and I had a very sudden loss of someone very close. This was completely unexpected and it’s been a bit to process. I’m sure I’ll discuss it some point down the line if I continue writing but if I publish our net worth numbers again I don’t want anyone trying to play the comparison game. This was someone’s retirement, a nest egg they had worked their entire lives for, and they passed away before they could enjoy any of it. And we were just gifted a sum of money… it’s complicated. Not in the estate processing, that was straight forward, but just how we feel about the funds. I don’t know. It’s weird and I’m still trying to process my thoughts. Maybe someone in the comments will just tell me I’m a lucky bitch and stop whining or I just tell myself that thru these posts. I don’t know.

Although I haven’t been blogging our finances are on autopilot. We are a lot more intentional with savings for experiences and we actually made a point this year to spend MORE on restaurants and entertainment. We are currently savings for a trip to Vancouver this summer. We looked at flights, got pissed off at how much flying is within Canada, then started to plan a road trip. Although, I’m sure we will spend just as much on gas and food as we would have for flights, we are much more excited to spend the money on a good road trip. We are tent/camping along highway 99 until we get to Vancouver, where we splurged on a hotel room right downtown. G is currently in Vancouver for work so he’s been able to scope out somethings for us to do. I’ve never been, so looking forward to seeing the west coast of Canada!

- M