Wow, thanks for all the advice!
I'm guessing you're not in Vancouver itself based on the real estate values you gave, unless things have gone way down from when I last looked.
No, we are in a suburb.
Under housing, your insurance sounds high for a condo. I personally pay about $17/mo with TD Meloche Monnex for condo insurance on a similar place.
Interesting. I hadn't considered that. We use BCAA for contents insurance, and pay $410/year. I'll shop around this week.
For groceries, do you shop at Costco? Is that what you mean by "bulk"? Also, how close are you to the US border? Our dairy number is much lower, but we are just a few minutes away from the US and we have Nexus. Even based on Canadian prices, your dairy number sounds high.
We do shop at Costco occasionally, but found the prices aren't *that* much lower. The border is a bit of trip, though we do go down when we visit friends who are close. Dairy works out to about $4 for milk, $8 for cheese, $3 for eggs, and $6 for yogurt - weekly.
Restaurants could definitely come down, but this is up you as to how much enjoyment you get from it. We have started cutting back on that - trying for $75/month down from a level close to yours. The first month was difficult, but after getting used to it I find it makes the times eating out more special.
Good to know. I'll run it past the wife. :)
Is that Alcohol number for out or in? If its out, you can easily save money by having friends over and drinks at home. Ours is mostly in, and I count it as part of groceries. Our combined groceries and alcohol number is $400-$450 depending on the month so far.
That's entirely in. "Out" alcohol I count under restaurants. We could just drink less, I know, but this isn't something I'm willing to give up. Hmm, now I sound like a complainypants.
Nexus comes in handy for gas prices as well (under $4/gal even with the exchange rate - I find it's usually about 20% cheaper), but again, this may not be worth it for you depending on what city you're in.
$1200/year for car repairs sounds high. My dad conservatively goes with $1000/year for a 20+ year-old vehicle. A $5000 car should be much newer than that and shouldn't need nearly as many repairs. I don't see why you should need more than $50/month. Besides, you are saving plenty of money that you could redirect if you had a real emergency.
Yeah, like I said above I fill up whenever I'm close to the line, but we live far enough that it doesn't make sense to go down all the time. I pulled the number for repairs out of thin air - I like your numbers better! :)
> Good for you for taking transit! If that cost is for one, I didn't realize Translink was so expensive. I know some workplaces offer discounted transit passes. Have you looked into that?
Yeah. This is one-zone, one person. I have friends who commute 3 zones, and they pay $170/month/person. The discounted employee pass is gone as of Jan 1 this year.
Internet sounds a bit high - $70/month for the cheapest plan? No home phone or cable with that? Maybe look at Telus and/or threaten to leave and see what kind of deal you can get.
Yeah.
http://www.shaw.ca/internet/plans/ . The lowest one is $55 and it's unusably slow for us. The next one up is a big bump in upload speed, and it's $60. I might call them and threaten to leave though, good idea. They keep calling me and offering full cable for $5/mo which I turn down.
How much stuff do you need? Ask yourself if you really need future large purchases, comparison shop, buy used, etc. The latest gadget always sounds nice, but there are things like our tablet that just sits around 90% of the time. It sounds like you've done your big spending recently, so you shouldn't need to continue this indefinitely.
You should have seen our budget last year! My wife's camera gear all comes off Craigslist now. Hmm, let's see the big stuff we bought in the last year - A laptop for her (photo editing, necessary), two lenses off CL, a new phone to replace her crazy old one, and then $1000 of other stuff, including things like laundry, drycleaning, household supplies... Will definitely think more about how to cut back here, but I'm hoping we are well stocked on the tech front for the next couple of years.
We are trying for about $20/month for Christmas (so $240 at Christmas, which we successfully did this past year), plus $20/month for birthdays/other gifts.
I think agreeing upon a number in advance is a good idea. We said last year we were going to "cut back" without setting a specific number, and woke up Christmas morning with my wife's parents to a pile. Like, a giant pile of stuff. Which was a bit smaller than last year's pile.