Do you know how much your pets cost you a month? Every 6 months? A year perhaps?

Recently my bank (RBC) introduced a finance tracker which allows you to categorize and see exactly where you’re spending your money. For kicks, I decided to see how much my pets are costing me (seeing that I just spent $20 on a dog nail trimmer AGAIN!) and the results were somewhat surprising.

I should also say that they are far from the first bank [...]

Remember these bad boys?

Whilst wondering through the many webs of the internet, I happened across a financial blogger named ‘Len’. I was instantly intrigued by his blog. He has a great following and a number of really different, interesting articles – the one which I wanted to point out to you (or few I should say) are the ones in which he does a blind taste test of common grocery items.

What a great idea! Let’s find out if that [...]

Well not only am I trying to limit the groceries which we purchase and try to spend a lot smarter during the course of a month – as you may know I’m also trying desperately to reduce my debt – this debt being my line of credit, and any credit cards.

My first update was back in June 2009 and at that time I told myself that I was 12.07 months from being out of debt (keep in mind this [...]

You know it’s hard not to notice a nice car, at least it is for me. It sticks out, it’s shiny, it’s sporty, it doesn’t have a roof, perhaps it’s absolutely enormous (think Hummer), whatever the reason for it sticking out – it does. I’m not sure about you, but as soon as I notice a nice car, I try to take a look at who’s driving it. What am I thinking?

Hmm… honestly, I guess it all depends on the [...]

Wow what a weekend! Photographed an amazing wedding on Saturday (see some of the pictures here), tons of yard work Sunday, monthly poker game Friday night, hockey tonight (plus some groceries), tried to touch up as many photos as I could on Monday… May is going to be over before I know what hit me!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining and all of these things I really enjoy – so what’s to complain about eh? I just wish I [...]

So here it is, Monday morning – the 3rd of May – I apologize for not getting this update out sooner – however I just haven’t had the chance to truthfully. To get right to the point, as you know at the beginning of last month I set a challenge for myself and Liz to go the entire month on $200 worth of food.. or $50 a paycheck each.

Next Month

Before I tell you if we succeeded or not – let [...]

Well we are now on day 20 of our $200 food for a month experiment which you can read about here, basically we’ve budgeted ourselves $50 a week to eat for the month to see how we get along.

The amount of money that we’re now down to is around $14! This isn’t good.. or maybe it is. Liz isn’t as positive about this as I am, but the way I look at it – we have 10 days to [...]

Holy record breaking temperatures! I’m not sure what you guys did over the weekend – but I tried to spend as much time outside as I could. I’m actually starting to think I may have jumped the gun on a few things – such as taking out the patio furniture, raking up the leaves, cleaning up the yard and I even planted some seeds (inside though in our little mini-greenhouse).

Something else myself and Liz are going to try is [...]

You Can Save Some Green.. Definitely

So in part 1 of this series I wrote about basically how easy it was to open up an account with Questrade, and told you step by step on how to go about doing it. In this part, I’m going to show you how to fund your account, make it automatic and how to start buying mutual funds.. whether it be on a monthly, bi-monthly, yearly basis. I mean unless you’ve got some loose [...]

Over two weeks ago, I posted that I was ‘broke’ for two weeks as my paycheck was already spent. Well, I’ve reached payday after those two weeks.. and well, I’m no further ahead. I was hoping that my laptops screen was lying to me, but alas.. it was not this morning when I checked it over my coffee.

Mind you, I’m not in the depressed state of mind I was that fateful Tuesday since I have a little bit more spending [...]