living on a budget.

I don't know how many of you know about Quicken? For us its been a life saver!! We use to do everything in Excel and have to change it every time we had a new bill coming in or a bill that's paid and take it out. Quicken is a great way to show you what comes in and what comes out each and every month. It shows your lowest forecasted amount in the bank account for the month. It uploads each transaction you do through your online banking. It can show you your net worth. Also it shows you according to your mortgage and the interest rate your paying, how much interest over the 20 year mortgage (or whatever your mortgage term is) you pay. It graphs your spending and shows you what percent you spend on housing, food, auto, entertainment etc. This helps us know our weak areas and what we need to cut back on and where we can spend more.

The whole reason I’m blogging this is i just wanted to share with everyone something that has really helped us through these past few months. Dave not working for the past 4 months and I now being on mat leave we have had to rely on our budgeting for everything.

Another one of my favorite things Dave and I have is we bank through Scotia, they have a program called “bank the rest.” What they do is every time you do a transaction they round up and bank the “extra” into your saving account. For example we spend $23.08 at Wal-Mart and then get $46.22 in gas that day. So they round up to $24 at Wal-Mart and $47 in gas. We choose to round to the nearest dollar instead of $5. Where if you choose that option it would be $25 at Wal-Mart and $50 in gas. So for us $1.80 went into our saving account that day. This adds up fast and its such little amounts that you don't even notice it being gone.

With summer coming and so many extra spending activities i just thought i would share some of our tips.     Happy Budgeting!