Money Wise Mom

Published: 2026-09-18

We travelled a lot this year. So far, I’ve taken eleven trips. These have all been within the province and the budget for each has varied. I have one more local trip I’m taking this weekend and then we will end our year with la pièce de résistance: a trip to Sweden where we will watch the WFTDA roller derby championships!

As I am writing this, thirteen trips sounds extreme to me. It’s certainly the most I’ve ever travelled in one year for personal entertainment. I suspect we will calm down our travel plans next year, but who knows! This year we focused on doing a lot of roller derby activities which kept us busy most weekends over the summer season.

How to Think About Vacations

Vacations shouldn’t take you by surprise and you shouldn’t take on debt for travel. You are in charge of deciding how many trips you take, where you go, and how much you will spend.

Here is how we approach vacation spending.

1. We allocate vacation spending in our monthly budget This has been our system for the past 30 years. In our traditional earning years, we would move a budgeted amount, for example $200 a month, to a separate account that I lovingly referred to as our “slush fund”. Now a days, we work a little differently, but for most people, I highly recommend a separate spot to stash earmarked cash. Our slush-fund account held house money intended to pool over time for large expenses like vacations, annual insurance bills, and Christmas. How much we had sitting in each “pot” of our slush fund was tracked within our budget. This system gave us predictability, stability, and an upper limit to what we could spend.
   
   Predictability: We transferred money every month, without fail from our joint daily spending account to our slush fund account. It was a “bill” that we paid ourselves. If we didn’t spend it all in one year, it would roll into the next year to give us a bit more spending power, if we wanted it. Our system kept our money management simple and boring (which is the goal!).
   
   Stability: Our monthly transfer meant a slow and steady drip of money into our pool. The monthly amount was decided once a year, during a money talk. We reviewed our income and expenses and set out all our planned spending for the upcoming year. The amount we allocated to vacation was based on what our household could afford monthly and it fit within on our total life expenses of 25% net income.
   
   A Ceiling: Our system made it very easy to know when we could afford a trip, if ever. Instead of making life “exciting” and just deciding we deserved a vacation as we felt like it, our system insulated us from making choices based on FOMO. We did not “stretch ourselves” and there was no “we will figure it out later” mental gymnastics. We had the money that we had and it would only go so far. If we could afford $200 a month for vacations, the math was simple, that’s a max of $2400 a year for vacation spending.
   
2. We set special budgets for special occasions At a monthly money talk last last year, well before the travel season was upon us, we decided together that we wanted to dedicate more to travel this year. It was our first year together as retired and we wanted to spend more time focusing on roller derby events. So we looked at what we felt we could afford and allocated two extra pots of money. These are considered one time “special spending” budgets. The money was from surplus cash, rather than our monthly budgeted vacation amount.
   
   Pot 1: France Trip Local Derby Travel
   
   I wanted to attend MRDA championships in France. It ticked the box in which we like to double up derby destination travel with fun experiences and going to France is on my bucket list. So, I pencilled a special budget line item for a trip. However, as we approached the travel season and during one of our monthly money talks, my husband had a counter proposal: rather then blow so much money on one trip, we should spread our budget over a lot more short and local trips, giving us a heck of a lot more derby experiences. I came around to the plan and I figure we are simply deferring a France trip to a future adventure.
   
   Pot 2: Sweden Trip
   
   This will be a ten day trip that we are both looking forward to! We are gong to the 2026 WFTDA Roller Derby Championships and padding a few extra days for sightseeing. Would I have thought to go to Sweden otherwise? Probably not, but that’s the fun of bundling travel with derby. We see corners of the world we would not otherwise have visited. I had assumed that because we no longer had day jobs, it would be “easy” to spend several weeks overseas. But two things worked against us: 1) vacationing is not cheap! For a multi week trip, I think I would need to be more creative to try and live like a local rather than a tourist 2) somehow we are still really busy! We have life stuff happening at home which didn’t lend itself for us taking a longer trip.

The Best Vacation is One You’ve Already Paid For

I like planning stuff and we both really like tracking stuff.

1. Set your budget ceiling. Either from your pooled vacation money or from a special pot of “extra” funds that you already have on hand.
   
2. Build your budget! Planning the trip is (for me) the super fun part. I build a spreadsheet that lays out your itinerary, when you depart and return, which calculates your total days of travel.
   
   I always include a few standard categories:
   
   
   EV Charging (if driving) or Flights – based on how many times we figure we will need to supercharge our car or a google flight search
   
   Accommodations – I use a guesstimate rate for accommodations, based on a somewhat educated guess as to where we are going, and times it by the total days. In the example below, I assumed $100 per day for hotel or an airbnb.
   
   Food & Drink – Similar to accommodations, I assume a daily rate of $75
   
   Events & Attractions – For a short / targeted trip, you might only have one event you are attending. You can either build your budget around that (i.e. the cost of a pair of tickets to the event) or, if it’s a trip where we want to sight see, I’ll just set a daily rate of $50-$100 (best guess) to have something to stay within.
   
   Land Travel – Typically required for sightseeing trips. This might be a rental car, local transit, or ride services.
   
   

3. Decide if you can afford it. This is a big one and you must not skip it. At this point, we have not yet committed to taking the trip. Will the projected budget for the trip fit within our budget? For example, maybe flights are really expensive. If you are working from special budget of extra money, maybe you can allocate some of your vacation to cover the gap. Otherwise, the trip is probably a no go. And that’s okay! It’s far better to realize if you can afford a trip before you start booking stuff, rather than dealing with a debt hangover afterwards!

4. Book Stuff! Once you know you can afford it, you have the green light to book stuff! I like to copy past links and screen shots of my flight and accommodation booking into my spreadsheet so everything is in one place. As you pay for stuff, track your actual spending. Being over budget in one category is not a big deal, as long as it fits your total trip budget.

5. Let the count down begin! Now that everything is booked, you get to sit back and anticipate how much fun your next adventure will be!

6. Enjoy your fully funded guilt free trip! There is nothing as good as guilt free travel. Having everything paid for ahead of time means you will enjoy being in the moment, without a foreboding feeling of a looming debt hangover.

7. Post trip stuff – As I mentioned, we like to track stuff. So we do keep track of our travel spending. After a trip, we ensure the money we spent during travel is tracked in the Actual column of our budget sheet, so that we can keep ourselves accountable. Tracking our spending also helps us with our guesstimates for planning future trips.

Rinse and Repeat

And that’s how we plan all our trips! It’s a simple system and it’s easy to replicate. It also keeps us within a spending limit. And sometimes, it helps us feel good about turning down opportunities. Even with so much travel this year, I did turn down three other travel opportunities, solely because it wasn’t in our plan and I couldn’t afford it. And that’s totally okay! We all have limited funds and we all have the power to choose what we do with them.

Published: 2026-08-28

It’s my anniversary today. My husband and I have been married 27 fun filled years. We have known each other for 32 years, which is wild to think about! Even more wild is how much I love my guy. Yup, we’re one of those gross couples who are still madly into each other and I see zero signs of that petering out any time soon.

I am a big believer in celebrating milestones. What I struggle with, sometimes, is deciding the best way to mark certain occasions.

The main issue is that, culturally, North Americans are not that creative. The norms for a celebration are typically food (going out to eat), drinks (ordering an expensive bottle of wine), and sometimes gifts (flowers, gold watches, etc.).

Diminishing Returns

When we were first married, we were crazy poor. Like, we slept on a twin mattress together poor. For, like, a year. So, it goes without saying, that celebrating every early milestone by eating out felt luxurious. For the first five years of our marriage, a milestone moment was probably the only time we sat down in a restaurant to eat. The only exception I can think of was our honeymoon where we lived it up and went out to eat nightly!

But after six or seven times around the sun, our mentalities started to shift. It was around this time that I graduated university, we started to earn double income, and I got my first career related job that was not in the service industry.

Suddenly we had choices. I don’t think we felt like we had money to burn, but we definitely could decide to eat out more, if we wanted to.

The funny thing is, though, that, by this time, we were used to cooking meals at home. All our meals, including bagged lunches for school and work.

With all that practice, we got pretty good at cooking. We learned how to make a steak better than the Keg. We learned how to make seriously delicious pizza. We learned how to make a melt in your mouth roast with Yorkshire pudding. We learned to make a Caesar salad exactly how my husband likes it.

We also were conscious of how much our time was worth. We were both still early in our careers, so while we had lifted ourselves above the poverty line, we were definitely not drowning in cash. We knew how many hours of work it took to buy something, including a sit down meal at a restaurant.

As time unfolded, we just didn’t enjoy going out to eat as much. We found we were paying a chunk of money for an experience that was kinda meh for food that was also kinda meh.

It was around this time that we finally looked at each other and admitted that we didn’t really want to go out to eat.

Finding the Fun

And so a new tradition was born. During this phase of our lives we had two young kids and both of us were working full time. Life was pretty exhausting. It meant that time together had become our most precious resource.

So, for many years, our new go to plan became Xbox and chill. Our game of choice? Dynasty Warriors

And so, for years, our go to anniversary fun was playing this game for hours upon hours. If a new version was out, we would “splurge” on the latest copy. We might order in something or make something and likely we would grab a bottle of sparkling wine.

Keeping Tradition Alive

I am a bit of a romantic and for my anniversary I have very much enjoyed giving my husband a “traditional” anniversary gift. I find it a little bit of a fun creative adventure to make or find a gift that he will enjoy made from the traditional material associated with that year. For our first anniversary, I wrote out our wedding vows on fancy hand made paper. For our 7th anniversary, I gifted him a Razer Copperhead computer mouse. For our 25th, I gifted him silver cuff links with the Cameron insignia on them.

I confess that I don’t remember my gift from every year and I’m sure he doesn’t remember them either. For our 25th, I know we will cherish the big party we threw with our friends and the his & her tattoos that we designed for ourselves far more than some shirt jewellery that now sits in a box on his end table. Still, no regrets, because for me the act of giving a “creative” gift is fun.

You might be surprised to know that my husband rarely gets me an anniversary gift. I think perhaps it may have happened for first year, but I really couldn’t say for sure. And that’s totally fine by me. A gift is not expected or necessary. I don’t want flowers or mindless stuff. While I enjoy thinking of creative gifts to give, he does not. For him, I think having to give a gift under pressure of a date on a calendar is the polar opposite to joy. So, for us, it’s not a big part of how we choose to celebrate.

Evolution

Over the years we’ve built our own traditions. Most importantly, we have evolved our traditions as we’ve evolved as people.

We gave ourselves permission to be more intentional with how we spend our time and money while celebrating being together.

So tell me, how do you celebrate your milestones?

Published: 2026-07-17

My hopes and dreams for this blog is that it will help you win the money game. It’s a way for me to document any wisdom that I’ve learned from those who’ve gone before me so that I may share it with the people coming after me. While writing, I have specific people in mind that I am writing to, like my kids, my nieces and nephews, my friends, and my grandkids.

I have a personal goal to publish 1 to 2 posts a week. I am very goal orientated (shocking, I know) and weekly posts keep me creating. I’ve been really enjoying the blog format; it focuses me on one topic at a time for a few hundred words and gives me a small sense of accomplishment. Each published post feels like a small step further on the path I’m marking for you. However, some posts are me simply sharing a bit of news or something that’s on my mind. They help break up the serious stuff, which might become too dry if it was the only thing I wrote about.

The challenge is that having an seemingly endless stream of posts becomes overwhelming. My goal with this blog is definitely not to drown you in endless content.

And so, I’ve created a new page for Essential Posts as a link library of each series that deep dives into the most important topics for building wealth.

You can still read all my posts in chronological order here. And I really hope that you subscribe to my mailing list, join me on this journey, and keep up with my weekly posts.

But, for simplicity and clarity, you now have my Essential Posts page. It cuts through the noise of endless content and highlights the key information that you need to take control of your money. I hope you like the format and it makes learning and reviewing concepts easier to digest.

Enjoy!

Published: 2026-06-21

Published: 2026-06-15

Thank you @cherry for your encouragement to add a comment section under posts. I’ve updated the site, completed some minimal testing, and we’re all systems go!

For anyone wishing to add a comment, you will first need to register for an account and be logged in before you may leave a note.

I look forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts and reactions to posts going forward. 🙂 If you run into issues, please feel free to email me at info@moneywisemom.ca

Cheers

Published: 2026-05-10

It’s Mother’s Day and I am dedicating this post to celebrate my mom! Without her, there would be no Money Wise Mom.

Everyone has a mother. Moms shape and influence us in so many ways. When I think about my mother, I’m grateful for the many lessons that she’s taught me.

How to Budget

I’ve had a budget for my entire adult life. No one had to teach me how to budget because I grew up watching my mom manage our household spending. She had this big white binder. She would pull it out periodically and sit with it at our kitchen table. I watched her scribbling away in it, totalling up household receipts. It was through her consistency and habit that I internalized the importance of tracking my spending.

How to Balance the Value of a Dollar

My dad used to say “A penny saved is a penny earned!”. He may have said it, but my mom lived it. She was the primary shopper raising three kids. We didn’t want for anything but she didn’t get silly buying brand name clothes either. If we wanted a new toy, we might try to work on her a bit. Sometimes we “won” but she also wasn’t shy to say no, or not right now, or we can’t afford it. But on the flip side, we always had plenty of gifts under our Christmas, we had school supply shopping every fall, and we went on some big family vacations. My brothers and I were in sports and extra curricular activities. We definitely were raised not to waste money, but money should be used as a part of a good life.

How to Meal Prep

I was often my mom’s helper at the grocery store. I remember her planning dinners and making lists before we shopped. I remember her prepping a week’s worth of sandwiches for my dad’s big metal work lunch box, which she packed every day. As I entered the work force, I always packed my lunches. Even to this day, my husband and I meal plan. It’s a habit that’s saved us heaps of money.

Eating out is a Treat

As a family, eating out was generally reserved for special occasions. Fast food might happen if we were on a family vacation. Restaurants might happen to celebrate a graduation or an anniversary. Reflecting on my life and those of my brothers, none of us eat out overly much. DoorDash is not a thing any of us really do.

How to be Resourceful

My mom is not afraid to pick up a hammer. She is not afraid to learn new things. She is hard working. She worked in the home raising kids and running the household. She ran a private home day care business for many years. I watched her navigate through life negotiating for what she wanted. She taught me what tenacity looks like. If something stood in her way, she often found a way around it. She was clever and resourceful and I know I get those qualities from her.

How to be Generous

My mother is incredibly generous and I see that she gets tremendous joy by helping others. I owe her a great deal for supporting me when I became a teenage mom. She came with me to my prenatal appointments and she cared for my daughter during week days so that I could finish my last semester of high school in class. She cared for foster children. She cared for her aging parents. She’s planned and funded major multi-family vacations, allowing our scattered families to come together and make wonderful memories. She makes beautiful handmade quilts, many of which she gives away.

Mom, Thank you for all the lessons you’ve taught me. They have served me well and I have, in turn, passed them on to my children. What a beautiful legacy.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Published: 2026-03-31

I live in a land of abundance. It just took moving half way around the world for me to fully appreciate it!

Let me share the moral of my story up front: With some patience and a gatherer’s mindset, you can save money, improve your life, and be kind to the environment.

For context, last year my husband and I relocated from Australia back to Canada. And, as it turns out, shipping stuff 18,000 km is pretty freakin expensive. Thus, we were faced with the brutal decision of what to leave behind. Even though we moved to Oz with a very modest amount of stuff and rented furnished apartments, we still had to sell or give away the accumulation of three years of living before we returned home. Ultimately, we returned to Canada with just a few mementos: our clothes, board games, roller derby gear, and computers. (Actually we returned several months before our stuff, which took another six months to arrive by sea!)

We turned a page to begin a whole new chapter as we settled in a new city with no furniture or furnishings. In many ways we were starting from scratch.

What a cool opportunity.

We could have easily rushed to buy everything we “needed” brand new on day 1. But we didn’t want to spend a tonne of money while we were finding our feet. So, we decided to rebuild slow. We chose to take our time to source most of what we needed second hand.

And, wow-zah, did the world provide! One major benefit to living in a big city is that there are plenty of people with more stuff than they know what to do with.

These are the places we found free stuff:

1. Freecycle
2. Kijiji Free posts
3. Online community sites (for example, our roller derby league has a Slack channel for members to exchange free stuff)
4. “Free Stuff” left at the end of driveways
5. Friends and family

And here are items that we found for free!

1. Coffee table
2. End Tables (used as bedside tables)
3. TV cabinet
4. Computer Desk
5. Piano bench seat
6. Two dressers (both of which we ended up giving away)
7. Kitchen table & four chairs
8. Dining table & six chairs
9. Ceramic bowl
10. Serving Bowls
11. Sauce pot
12. Bicycle
13. A full set of chef knives
14. Brie ceramic baking pot with lid and a cute little bamboo paddle knife (I love it so much!)
15. Place mats and cloth napkins
16. Several small baskets
17. Laundry hamper
18. Two small garbage cans with swinging lids
19. Bathroom garbage can with foot pedal
20. Kitchen garbage can
21. Kitchen step stool
22. End table lamp
23. Floor lamp
24. A fancy wine corkscrew
25. Two 23L glass carboys
26. Around 60 wine bottles
27. A set of very fluffy towels, still new in packaging
28. An iron
29. Garden hose winder
30. Plant pots
31. Art supplies
32. Sewing supplies
33. Knitting supplies
34. Weighted work out vest
35. Glassware & mugs, including wine and martini glasses
36. Wood salad tongs
37. Paint
38. Broom with dust pan
39. Snow shovel
40. Hanging file folders
41. Ink jet printer with scanner
42. Glass bread pan
43. Metal bread pan
44. Stone rolling pin (which we also gave away, along with a few boxes of other misc kitchen stuff)
45. An adorable apron with lots of huge pockets
46. Electric sandwich press & grill
47. Ikea shoe cabinet

And probably some other items that I’ve forgotten about.

We also frequented thrift stores, The ReStore, and Kijiji to buy second hand items like these:

1. Coffee maker
2. Coffee grinder
3. Bread knife
4. Slow cooker
5. Glass casserole dishes
6. Clothes

You do need to be patient to follow this approach. You also need to be willing to deep clean items and sometimes mend them. I find giving items a second life and saving them from a landfill extremely rewarding. Often second hand items are basically as good as new and would have become trash if they hadn’t been rescued.

You also need a sense of humour or maybe a dose of humility. You need to find the joy in the moment and be grateful for what you have rather than begrudging what you don’t. My husband and I enjoyed a few weeks of dining cross legged at coffee table before we found tables and chairs. I actually found it kinda romantic. We wouldn’t have had such a memorable time if we had just run out to buy furniture. We’re still searching for a decent kettle, which means I’m currently boiling water for my tea in a pot. And that’s okay. It’s really not a big deal and, when we do find a kettle we like, we will appreciate it all the more!

We feel very fortunate to have found so many useful things. We didn’t need to spend heaps of money and we didn’t need to go into credit card debt. We just needed to take our time while living in a land of abundance.

Published: 2026-03-21

I have a book in the works but finding the motivation to write down everything that’s floating in my head is tough. And frankly, sharing my story in such a personal way is a bit scary.

But I don’t want to wait for a perfect book draft to reach people. I always seem to have a lot to say and I’m always keen to share knowledge. Starting this blog means that I don’t want have to wait for one major publication to share tips and insights with you. Through posts, I can share information in bite size pieces, which I hope you will find easy and enjoyable to read (and useful!).

As I move through the world and talk with people, they ask me questions and I share what I can. In turn, this motivates me to post and share with more people, who may have the same questions. My hope is that through blogging and other socials, I can continue to grow the conversation. The more people I talk to, the more exciting it is to connect with more people and hopefully help them improve their lives.

So please keep motivating me with your questions and comments! Ask me anything – there are no silly questions – when you see me or via email or socials. If you’re curious and want to know more about building wealth and taking control of your money, please get involved and support me. A really easy way to stay connected is by subscribing to this blog and you’ll get an email every week with links to new posts.

Thank you!

Published: 2026-03-02

Ahhh, the blank page of a fresh new blog site. It’s like opening a paper notebook for the very first time; the smell of promise is as distinct as it is unmistakable.

The idea for this site has been percolating within me for about a year. First and foremost, I want to support people who want to be intentional with their money. My goal is to reach audiences who typically shy away from financial topics. This is a no judgement space where I can share how to build personal wealth in a simple and straight forward way.

Over the past three decades, my husband and I have built a fantastic life together. We started as teen parents, living below the poverty line, and raised two amazing kids while working as one team towards our dream of early retirement (Freedom 45, baby!). I love sharing what we learned along the way that allowed us to make money work for us, rather than having to work for money.

To be clear, you don’t need to be pursuing early retirement or financial independence to get value from this site. The foundations of money management are the same for everyone. You have the power to decide how fast you will go, what dreams you’ll to pursue, and what provides a wonderful life. I can help you keep the power of money in perspective and nudge you towards living a balanced intentional financial life.

So welcome, friends! I’m so glad you’ve found me here and I’m looking forward to sharing thoughts, inspirations, and ideas!