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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How We Earn Extra Money: Selling Stuff on Kijiji

I recently mentioned that we are saving up for a new vehicle despite having no extra room in our budget.   We have managed to save up about $3000 towards this by finding ways to earn extra income aside from our regular paycheques.  This is one of the ways we've been earning extra money! You can see the rest of the ways we earn extra money here! 

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a bit about the decluttering campaign that I began once I started my maternity leave.  I talked about selling all kinds of our 'junk' on Ebay and how we had sold all sorts of things from DVDs to USB sound cards to used cloth diapers using this method. I love Ebay because it gives me a great platform to sell small items and reach a large audience.  What do you do if you have a large item though? After all, it's not very practical to ship a piano across the country.

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How We Earn Extra Money: Simple Computer Repair

I recently mentioned that we are saving up for a new vehicle despite having no extra room in our budget.   We have managed to save up about $3000 towards this by finding ways to earn extra income aside from our regular paycheques.  This is one of the ways we've been earning extra money!


I am very lucky to have an incredibly talented husband.  He is very handy and seems to understand how things work on a level I may never comprehend.  Somehow over the years he has become extremely adept at fixing and building computers.

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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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How We Earn Extra Money: Selling Our Stuff on Ebay

I recently mentioned that we are saving up for a new vehicle despite having no extra room in our budget.   We have managed to save up about $3000 towards this by finding ways to earn extra income aside from our regular paycheques.  This is one of the ways we've been earning extra money! You can see the rest of the ways we earn extra money here!

One of the things that drove me nuts when I first went on maternity leave was all the clutter in our home.  We've spent the last 10 years working our butts off during the week and shopping on the weekends and the amount of stuff built up in our home was showing it! Being forced to sit at home and look at it, and put it away and clean it made me crazy and all I could think about was getting rid of it.

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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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Our Financial Goals: Where We're Headed

Our specific goals are always changing. However, the general idea behind our goals stays the same; we want to achieve a level of financial freedom that allows us to create an acceptable (to us) balance between work and play.  Throughout the years, we have felt forced to stay at certain jobs and work extra hours because of financial obligations and we want to feel as though we have more of a say in this.  (We realize that we are responsible for our actions and that we always have a choice as to what we do, but we have sometimes felt that the monetarily responsible choices in our situations aren't very agreeable when they mean staying in an exceptionally stressful work situation or seeing less of our family than we desire.)

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How We Earn Extra Money: Teaching Piano

I recently mentioned that we are saving up for a new vehicle despite having no extra room in our budget.   We have managed to save up about $3000 towards this by finding ways to earn extra income aside from our regular paycheques.  This is one of the ways we've been earning extra money! You can see the rest of the ways here!

My parents invested a lot of money into piano lessons for me while I was growing up.  I also invested a lot of time and energy into going to lessons and practicing (unfortunately less than I should have...)  I worked my way up to Grade 9 of the Royal Conservatory of Music and did fairly well.  I was really great at theory, quite good at music history and OK at the practical exams.

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Our Next Big Purchase

Currently we are saving for our next big purchase.  This is a bit of a new concept for us as we've never really saved for anything big before.  We've always just financed and paid it off after obtaining whatever it is we 'needed' at the moment.  It's actually very exciting!  We are planning to buy a new vehicle and pay for it in cash!

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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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Our Journey So Far

My husband and I managed to get by without any debt for about the first 4 years we were together.  After that it all started to go downhill.

The debt spiral started when we moved from our original town to our current city.  My husband was laid off from his construction job (it was winter) and he was offered his current job at a motorcycle dealership.  We actually turned the job offer down at first because the job was three hours away from where we lived at the time but after a few weeks we reconsidered and decided to just go for it.  The problem was that the new job was slightly lower paying than his old job and our rent would more than double.  Further adding to our problem was the fact that it took me a couple of months to find a job at the new location and even then, it wasn't as well paying as my old one.

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An Introduction

We are a family of three working towards a more self-reliant, financially free lifestyle.  My husband and I have been together for about 10 years.  Since then we've acquired a cat, a turtle, a dog, a house and a baby.   We do not mind working hard as long as it gets us to a place where we can enjoy ourselves and our family a little more and more as time goes on.

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