Baby On A Budget: How We Avoid Unnecessary Spending

Baby on a Budget is a series of posts that I'll be doing to share all the ways we've managed to save money while bringing up our baby.  When I read the stats about how much money new parents supposedly spend getting ready for a baby and caring for a baby in its first years, I cringe! I can certainly see how it happens though.... These posts are meant to help you stay away from that awfully high number!!

While it's certainly difficult to keep from buying every single thing your kid might possibly be able to use when you're still expecting, it's near impossible to exercise a reasonable amount of restraint once your child is actually born.  Suddenly, nothing is too expensive for that cute little face! Every piece of baby clothing becomes essential. $500 photo shoot? Completely necessary!

Luckily, I've devised a way that has become so effective in keeping me from spending excessive amounts of money on my child that it surprised even myself: I make my baby pay for his own stuff. (And he's much less likely to buy yet another pair of pants to add to his overflowing collection.)

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Baby On A Budget: Hand-Me-Downs and Second Hand Stores

Baby on a Budget is a series of posts that I'll be doing to share all the ways we've managed to save money while bringing up our baby.  When I read the stats about how much money new parents supposedly spend getting ready for a baby and caring for a baby in its first years, I cringe! I can certainly see how it happens though.... These posts are meant to help you stay away from that awfully high number!!

We were ridiculously lucky to have a baby boy almost exactly one year after my sister had her own baby boy.  This is not because our son would have a cousin close in age, though that's nice too.  My thoughts are inclined to be more selfish in nature.  I was mostly ecstatic about all the hand me downs I was about to receive!!

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How We Budget: A Simple and Easy to Maintain Budgeting Strategy

I have previously shown a breakdown of our budget in percentages (here and here) but neither of these breakdowns really served to show exactly how we budget on a day to day basis. I shared our budget categories in 'Our January Budget' but didn't go further than that.  We've finally come across a great method that's been working for us for about 9 months now and if it can help you do the same then it's worth sharing!

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Slashing Expenses: Couponing and Pricematching

I am desperately trying to cut our food budget.  I read about all these other people that are spending $50 a week on food or families of 6 spending $100 a week and I wonder how the heck they do it!?! I budget $200 a week on consumables and that feels like a lot.  That includes toiletries, gas and medications (mainly just over the counter) though so perhaps it isn't so bad...

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Manulife One Review

Here is my humble review of our Manulife One account.  I do not claim to know about all the different types of mortgages and accounts out there or pretend to have an idea of how it would work in your situation.  I can only attest to how it has worked for us over the last year and a half that we've been working with it and perhaps this will help you make an informed decision as to whether or not it is the right type of product for you.

I had seen the Manulife One commercials a few years back and looked into the M1 a bit but at that point we were new homeowners and didn't have enough equity in our home to take advantage. As time went on and we paid down more of our mortgage as the value of our home rose, I looked into it again.  This time I inquired about it on the website and an advisor offered to come meet with us.  I still didn't think we'd qualify and I was somewhat wary to look into it because I was embarrassed about the amount of debt we still had, even after paying a large chunk of it down! 
The M1 advisor actually informed us that we looked like good candidates for the account and explained how it all worked.  I had done a lot of research prior to the meeting so I didn't have a lot of questions.  The main drawback the I was able to find in my research is that this account has a $14 monthly fee.  I'm not ecstatic about the fee but using the account has saved us enough money in other ways to justify the monthly fee.  Perhaps once there is more competition in this market Manulife will decide to drop the fee. (hint, hint)

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Baby On A Budget: Making Your Own Baby Purees

Baby on a Budget is a series of posts that I'll be doing to share all the ways we've managed to save money while bringing up our baby.  When I read the stats about how much money new parents supposedly spend getting ready for a baby and caring for a baby in its first years, I cringe! I can certainly see how it happens though.... These posts are meant to help you stay away from that awfully high number!!

One of the things that I've highly enjoyed doing in the last few months is cooking for my baby.  This might be comical for those of you that know me as I'm not a great cook, but I love knowing exactly what my kid is eating and saving a whole bunch of money while doing it!  It's also nice to have a stockpile of baby food in my freezer and not have to be too concerned about running out as making the purees is as easy as pie (though, even with my limited cooking experience, I doubt making a pie is all that simple...)!

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Slashing Expenses: Cutting Your Own Hair

In order to reach our goal of financial freedom, we are increasing income and slashing our expenses.  We will be sharing ways that we've successfully decreased our monthly expenses in order to help you cut your own costs.

About once every month (two if I'm lucky) my husband talks me into cutting his hair. I have to be entirely honest; this is one of my least favourite ways to save money.  The only reason I go along with this is because my husband absolutely insists.  He hates going to the hairdresser as much as I hate cutting his hair.

If you are going to attempt to employ this crazy money saving technique in your own life, do yourself a favour and learn from our mistakes.

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Slashing Expenses: Saving Money on our Phone Bill

In order to reach our goal of financial freedom, we are increasing income and slashing our expenses.  We will be sharing ways that we've successfully decreased our monthly expenses in order to help you cut your own costs. 


We've been counting down to this January for the last several months.  It wasn't because we were going on a nice vacation or having a baby or buying a new car or anything terribly exciting like that; it was because our phone contract with Bell was finally going to be up. (!!!)

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Our January Budget

I realized after attempting to show an accurate picture of our current budget using a piechart here, (and failing miserably) that because of the way we budget, the only way to paint a realistic picture of a budget was to give an accurate accounting of where our money has gone in any given month.  As previously mentioned,  we have a Manulife One account and I had to make some major adjustments to the way we budget in order to get the most out of this account.  It took me about a year to really feel like I was 'on top of things' in this area.

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Budget Buster: Forgetfulness

We went away this past weekend and battled the Great Canadian Winter...  We travelled 'home' to see my family which is about three hours away from our actual home.  It was a less than awesome trip due to the very inclement weather.  We started out in freezing rain and ended up in extreme winds and white outs.  We were driving our truck which does not have four wheel drive.  When we finally arrived at our destination we ended up getting stuck at the top of a hill that was our hosts' driveway.  Lots of 'boy fun' later our truck arrived at the bottom of the hill via the other side of the hill (not meant for driving) and less one mirror thanks to an apple tree.  Thankfully, it's a beater truck and the mirror will probably be very inexpensive to replace.  It was definitely an adventure.

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Current Budget Breakdown

I have been tracking our finances meticulously for about 6 months now and have developed a fairly good budget for ourselves.  I was inspired to look at the big picture of our finances by this post the other day: Where's the Money, Honey? by Gail Vaz Oxlade (love!).  I decided to make myself a pie chart so I could see our budget breakdown.

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