Money Wise Mom

Published: 2026-10-22

In a previous post, I shared with you the system we use to budget for travel.

A quick recap:

• Have a system for vacation savings. For example, move money every month into a seperate account.
• Build a budget for your trip. Decide before you start booking tickets if you can afford the trip you want to take.
• Save up, then spend. Having vacation money saved up before you leave is the best way to skip money stress. No guilt travel is the best travel!

We are currently on the final days of our Sweden trip. I am writing this post from an Airbnb in downtown Copenhagen, sipping my morning coffee, full from a yummy homemade breakfast of eggs and avocado toast. Sadly, I am without my beloved hot sauce, but sometimes you just have to make due when you are on the road.

It’s been a great trip! We reconnected with some old friends, ate and drank our fill, and visited so many cool historical sites.

Living in the moment, I find it’s easy to feel a bit overwhelmed with so much spending. Converting prices on the fly can be a bit tricky and we have been tapping our cards left and right.

Luckily, we keep our cool by sticking to our travel budget. We chose to stay in control by tracking our spending as we go.

Each evening, when we’re back at our accommodations, we take 2 minutes to update our tracking spreadsheet before settling in. We use saved receipts if we paid cash or we use the days transactions from our Wise app if we paid by card.

It only takes a couple of minutes. And it means that we know 100% on a daily basis if we are under or over spent. And, since we know we are under budget, we can enjoy a guilt free final dinner out on our last day before heading home.

Published: 2026-10-15

Coupons are awesome.

I’m not talking about the coupons you clip. I don’t actually care much about retail coupons that come by way of flyers or your inbox. I’m talking about a family tradition that we’ve embraced for the almost 30 years.

In my family, it’s incredibly common for us to give each other IOU coupons as gifts.

Coupons have been on my mind thanks to my husband, who has been cashing in a string of IOUs that he’s been hoarding for years.

Why Coupons?

In my family, we celebrate Christmas.

Christmas is a highly commercialized holiday that is heaped in excess. Nestled in between the quant holiday traditions and the family gatherings is pressure to give store bought gifts, entertain, and dress up in fancy clothes. All the festivities are fun, but also lead to overspending, holiday debt hangovers, and over eating.

Enter the humble coupon.

Coupons help us keep it real. They cost time and effort rather than money. They require thoughtfulness and planning. A good coupon is tailored to the recipient. The coupon giver should put intention into their gift.

As a coupon receiver, you get the joy of cashing in the coupon, and you get the gift of anticipation! Part of the joy is planning the perfect time to cash in a coupon. It’s like a gift before the actual gift.

Experiences Over Things

In our early years, even though we didn’t have money to blow, we spent money we didn’t have on gifts.

There is so much social pressure to give stuff to each other. As parents, we definitely felt the pressure to give our kids stuff, some of which was pretty expensive. Most of it ended up broken at the bottom of a toy box. I can remember surveying an entire basement full of toys when my kids were little, wondering where it all came from and being overcome by how much work it was to clean up after.

In our culture, we normalize stuff as love to our kids. As parents, is up to us to show our kids a different path.

The sad truth is that most people cannot remember what you gave them last Christmas. Most people cannot remember what they gave last Christmas. It seems to me that we are all participating in an endless cycle of mindless purchases.

So why do we tie ourselves into pretzels trying to impress each other with purchases?

Commercialization. The entire retail industry wants you to equate buying stuff with love.

If you think about, who really needs more stuff in their life? Most of us have way more stuff than we need and a lot of the time we don’t even want the stuff we are given!

Doing something for and with someone is way more memorable, personal, and enjoyable.

I cherish the memory of going on a hike with my kids (given to me as a mother’s Day coupon) or breakfast in bed (given to me as a birthday coupon) or an afternoon of games with my daughter (given to me as a Christmas coupon).

Be Creative

Some of our families best coupon ideas from over the years

• A hike together
• Doing the dishes without complaining
• A board game of the receivers choice
• A batch of homemade pierogies
• Money towards a tattoo
• Breakfast in bed
• A game of crib
• Money towards a video game
• A massage
• A day of video games together

Perhaps you notice a trend? Many of them are no cost and allow us to spend time on or with each other.

Some Advice

Speaking from experience, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Give your coupons an expiry date. This will help people who like to hoard things actually use them
• The issue can mark up a coupon as “used” once it’s been redeemed. This lets the recipient hang on to it for memories, if they want, and is very satisfying as the issuer.. it’s just feels like a job well done after the promise has been fulfilled
• Get artistic. You can design your own coupon or find printable ones online for free. Have fun decorating them or put them on fancy paper or write them into a handmade card.

The best part of giving coupons is that you can tailor them to the recipient in really personal and meaningful ways.

I hope this holiday season, you go forth and coupon!

Published: 2026-10-09

It May Not Mean What You Think It Means

A few nights ago we had family over for dinner. It was really nice catching up. We chatted for quite a while and, eventually, over our post dinner coffees, the conversation turned to investing. It took a few beats for me to realize that, although we were all talking about investing, we were not all talking about the same thing.

There are two very different philosophies in the investing world. Active Investing and Passive Investing.

The disconnect in our dinner conversation is the inspiration for today’s post. To be clear, the investing approach I follow is passive, which is an entirely different beast than active investing.

Understanding Active vs Passive Investing

When most people hear the word investing, they picture some version of active investing. Active investing is picking stocks that are winners, tracking the latest news for hot tips, and, these days, probably buying and selling some crypto. When I hear people talk this way, I envision horse racing. Picking a winning stock is like picking a winning horse. The thrill of watching your stock portfolio rocket to the moon is not dissimilar to watching your horse cross the finish line in first place.

Passive investing is none of those things. Passive investing takes a long term, moderate view that it’s better to build wealth over time in a (somewhat) predictable way. If you are doing it right, it’s actually pretty boring!

Here are some hallmarks of Passive Investing

• Dollar cost averaging – This is the practice of investing the same amount of money regularly, regardless of how markets are behaving. For example, investing $200 every month no matter what. If markets are down, you get to buy products while they are on sale (yay!). If markets are up, you end up buying a little less, but at least you are still growing your nest egg. The important concept is that buying every month averages out in your favour over time.
  
• Investing in entire markets – Why pick one or two stocks when you can easily invest in 100s of the top performing companies in a market? This is the power of index funds. An index fund tracks the best performers in a group, for example the group of companies with stocks on the exchange. An index fund might track the top 100 companies with stocks on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). If one company’s stock value falls to spot 101, another company automatically graduates to spot 100. As an investor, you pick your index fund(s) and just keep investing in that fund, which automatically means your investing in the best 100 of the TSX. You don’t buy and sell specific company stocks. You don’t have to spend ANY mental bandwidth guessing which companies are winners and losers or worrying that you’ve held a looser for too long.
  
• Holding a mix of Stocks/Equity and Bonds – one of our rules of thumb is that when stocks go up, typically bonds are worth less. And when stocks go down, bonds are typically worth more. Stock values can vary a lot, bond values tend to vary a little over time. For this reason, to protect us from big swings in the stock market bouncing up and down, we invest in both stocks and bonds. A popular ratio is investing in 60% stock and 40% bonds. This is common practice considered to be pretty moderate to low risk. Of course, as an investor you can choose to hold more stocks (i.e. 70% stocks, 30% bonds) if you are fine exposing yourself more to stock market swings.
  
• Investing across markets in Canada, US, and International – We don’t want to tie ourselves to just one market in just one economy. There could be a recession in Canada, but the States might be booming. For this reason, we want to choose index funds with a healthy mix of financial markets from around the globe. With this strategy we get the best of what’s happening in Canada, the US, Asia, etc.
  
• Low Cost Investing – we want to protect our gains and we don’t want to lose more than we have to in upfront or hidden fees. The best ways to keep fees low is to manage your own investments via a no fee brokerage (like Wealthsimple) and to buy investment products with a low MER. You can read my post MER the Silent Wealth Killer if you would like a deeper dive into why.

When you are just learning, passive investing sounds like a lot. There are so many terms and concepts. But here are the stripped down basics to understand:

1. Buy Low Cost (ETFs with MER below 0.2%)
2. Buy On a Schedule (Invest Monthly)
3. Invest in Markets, not individual Companies (Index Funds)
4. Diversify (Stocks & Bonds, Domestic and International)

The Really Good News

The really good news is that some very smart people have created model portfolios that ticks all four of the passive investing boxes above! And, thanks to some other very smart people, you can achieve it all by buying one investment product. Yes, one product you can just keep buying and never have to think about it.

I’m referring to the Canadian Couch Potato model portfolio.

I have been following the Canadian Couch Potato (CCP) model portfolios for over twenty years. It has evolved over time as newer and better products have been created.

In the good old days, my portfolio was a mix of three products: ZAG, VCN, and XAW.

Nowadays, we can achieve the same diversification by picking one product, like VBAL, XBAL, or ZBAL. These funds are all pretty much the same thing. The “BAL” stands for “balanced”. The V, X, or Z is just indicating if you are buying your investment from Vanguard, iShares, or BMO.

If you check out the performance of these funds against each other, you will see they all perform essentially the same. That’s because they are all selling you the same groups (aka indexes) of products.

As you can see from the nice CCP chart below, the “BAL” holds 60% stocks and 40% bonds. If you want a slightly more spicy portfolio, you might pick VGRO instead of VBAL, which gives you 80% stocks and 20% bonds.

Since passive investing is “so easy”, you might expect that you are giving up growth in exchange for simplicity. You might assume that active investing is worth all the hassle, cuz that’s how you get rich, right?

Not according to what these guys, or these guys, or these guys have found.

It’s consistently reported that professional money managers have not been able to consistently out perform basic index funds that simply track the stock market automatically.

So why do so many people still bother with active investing? I can only imagine that it’s a big case of FOMO or a big case of not knowing a better way.

Compare and Contrast

Let’s illustrate my point with two fictional investors. Mia is an active investor. Chloe is a passive investor.

At 8:59 a.m., Mia opens her laptop and launches six websites. The stock market opens in one minute. She has three tabs for charts, two for breaking news, and one for “Is This CEO’s Tweet Bad?”

Meanwhile, Chloe opens her fridge to forage for breakfast.

At 9:13, Mia’s stocks in company XYZ dips by 3.2%. The line on her stock tracking chart keeps trending down, down, down. It’s dipped so much, company XYZ’s poor performance is now featured on the ticker feed of her favourite breaking news site. She starts to sweat. She refreshes her browser, muttering “I knew that earnings call had weird vibes.” She rushes to sell the stock before she looses any more money… only to see the stock price bounce back up, for no discernible reason. Grrr.

Chloe pours herself a coffee and scrolls her Insta feed.

By lunch, Mia has read twelve predictions, made nine trades, and developed a personal feud with a candlestick chart. “This market is irrational,” she says, while trying to predict what millions of other people would do next. Mia cranks her neck, which is feeling oddly tight.

Chloe’s investment plan is to own a diversified fund, add money regularly, and avoid checking it every hour. It happens to be the 15th of the month, Chloe’s money management day, so she checks her portfolio once on her lunch break. Yup, still looks about the same. Her automatic transfers and investment purchases are still working. She sees transfers in the day after her pay day and autonomic purchases the following day; several months of activity, all just as planned. Chloe goes outside for a walk in the sun.

At 3:57, Mia’s portfolio has moved up, down, sideways, and emotionally through all five stages of grief. She celebrated a winning trade, then discovered the fees. All in all, she figures she’s down about $2.75 from this morning.

Chloe has no idea how her portfolio did today. She’s heading out to catch up with an old friend for a drink.

At the end of the day, Mia announced, “I’m taking a break from investing.” Six minutes later, she pulls out her phone to check how the market is doing after hours.

Active investing can involve more research, trading, and stress; passive investing generally aims to track a broad market with fewer decisions. Neither guarantees a profit but, over time, Chloe should have a nice little nest egg that didn’t cause her to loose sleep at night.

—

This Investing ABCs series is for anyone who wants to start investing but doesn’t know the first thing about how to begin. You don’t need to read this series in order, but you should read and learn all the ABCs before venturing forth to buy investment products.

Thanks for reading!

Published: 2026-09-25

It takes a certain amount of confidence to make big money decisions.

I recall discussing retiring early with my husband, who looked me square in the eyes and said “Just don’t make me become a Walmart greeter, k?”. By which he meant, make sure your plan is rock solid and we won’t screw our future selves.

Gulp. Cool, no pressure, right?

His fear was that our plan would fail and we would have to go to back to work doing something we hate. My fear was that we would live a life of austerity but then not save up enough fast enough to retire early in a significant way. I did not want to live a life restricted in my 30s and 40s only to realize I only shaved 5 years off of my retirement date.

A Progression of Planning

I’ve used different systems over the years to motivate and guide our big money decisions. Having a plan that is mapped out by way of a spreadsheet has been my guiding light and essential to achieving our money goals.

The Debt Busting Years

In our debt repayment years, I was obsessed with Microsoft Money. This product no longer exists, but it was fantastic! Not only did it track our budget, it graphed all our debt repayment schedules over time, making it easy to see at glance exactly when we would be debt free. It also let us run scenarios, like what would happen if we upped our mortgage payment by $50 a week.

Having the ability to run scenarios made it easy to build a plan with my husband. Seeing the impact from paying off debt faster in terms of saving time and interested charges was very motivating. We were happy to lock in a spending plan that got us to our goal faster.

Want to build your own debt busting plan? Check out my Debt Busting section on my Handy Links page for online tools to track and run scenarios on paying down debt. Drop me a comment if you try it and let me know your impression.

The Saving Years

After our debt was handled, we transitioned to our saving years. I built a simple spreadsheet to project at what age we would hit our “number”.

If you are into FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), you might already have a “number” that you are working towards. In FIRE, your “number” is a target amount in savings (a.k.a your nest egg) that is big enough to to cover your daily expenses from your investment gains.

In our debt busting years, we followed the Life of Pie method, meaning we had been saving 10% along side paying down debt with at least 15% of our net income. This meant we had a small nest egg already accumulated. This was my “ground zero nest egg” and which become seed money for my spreadsheet calculation. I then mapped for every year how much we would have based on 7% investment growth with a monthly savings rate of $2250. Our safe drawdown rate is 4% of our nest egg. After setting up our base case, I copied the table and made versions that showed how much faster we would reach our number with a savings rate to $3000, $4000, etc.

Seeing the year we should theoretically be able to leave our day jobs was very motivating! It still didn’t feel real, but we knew the numbers on the page couldn’t lie.

It’s worth noting that in our saving years, we adjusted the Life of Pie method and accelerated our savings rate, sometimes as high as 50% of our income. If you don’t care about retiring early, this is not something you need to worry about at all! Just follow the Life of Pie method, and you will be totally fine with a pretty fantastic life. But if you are FIRE curious, I highly recommend reading The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement by Mr Money Mustache. This blog post changed my life! Then go ahead and devour the rest of his blog. It’s well worth the read!

Now a days there are much more sophisticated tools online that make my simple little spreadsheet look basic. If you are interested in trying some out, see an investment calculator called Smartasset, linked under my Handy Links under Investing, or the web app Projection Lab, linked under my Handy Links under Wealth Management. While these are very cool, you could also keep it basic like we did, and just build yourself a tidy little spreadsheet.

The FIRE Years

We are now in our FIRE years. We’ve retired early and now we need to manage and protect the nest egg so that it lasts into our traditional retirement years and beyond.

This is the probably the most nerve wracking phase. In order to pull the trigger and leave our day jobs, we REALLY needed to see the numbers mapped out.

To help us, about 3 or 4 years before we planned to retire at 45, I built an uber spreadsheet, which I will call our Projections spreadsheet. We still use it to this day to make big (and scary) money decisions.

Our Projections file maps out our annual income and expenses from the current year until we’re 95 years old. It also maps out our annual net worth, tracking assets and liabilities over time. Our expenses increase every year based on value for inflation, which we’ve set at 3%. Our investments grow annually based on a value for ROI (return on investment), which we’ve set at 7%. It also shows us the impact, over time, of drawing from our investment accounts, which will give us income now that we don’t have day jobs.

Our file is both simple and not simple, at the same time. It’s evolved heavily over the years, especially as we came closer to leaving our jobs. For us, it’s a guiding light that lets us know we’re gonna be okay. It’s also a tool that we call on when we have to make big life decisions. For example, when we returned to Canada, we used it decide where we could live and keep on budget. In this past year, we used it help us decide how much we could afford to spend on travel. We can’t account for everything in our monster of a spreadsheet, but we can get pretty darn close. That being said, FIRE is not for the faint of heart! If you want to FIRE, you need to know your numbers inside and out.

Bone Shaker

Last week we received some impactful news. Our tenant, who was renting out our “forever” home while we were in Australia, has given their notice. When we returned to Canada, we made a big life decision not to evict them immediately and continue renting while we spent time in another part of the country. Losing renters means that we are losing a revenue stream that helped offset some (not all) of the carrying costs for us to keep that property. In our dream scenario, our tenants would have stuck around for another year. With the big news, we need to re-assess our life plans going forward.

Queue the panic alarms? Actually, not at all. Sure, the news is a bit stressful, mostly as an interruption in the status quo of our lives. But we have a baseline plan, and now we just need to review and adjust accordingly. So we dusted off our trusty Projection spreadsheet and mapped out what this means for us financially, based on what we know today. And guess what? We should be okay. Our Projections have given us the confidence to know that we don’t need to rush into any panic based decisions. We will want to make some adjustments over the next 5 to 10 years and next year we won’t plan a big vacation like this year, but that doesn’t feel like a great sacrifice right now.

Confidence (Question Mark)

Where does confidence come from? To be clear, even with our spreadsheets and our life planning, it’s not all smooth sailing all the time. We still can get queasy stomachs about what the future will hold. But all we can do is make the best decisions we can with what we know today. That’s all any of us can do, really. For us, confidence comes from being organized, disciplined, and based on real numbers that make sense.

What’s Your Take?

Have you had to deal with a big financial change? Did you have a system in place? Were you able to lean on an emergency fund? Drop me a comment or an email, I would love to hear what you would do!

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: 2026-09-04

Clarification means providing more details or an interpretation to clear up confusion. It means to make something more clear. When something becomes more clear, we have clarity.

I owe you all a clarification. In my last post Milestones, I spoke to how my husband and I have evolved our approach to celebrating our anniversary from a more conventional and commercial minded approach to something more tailored to our preferences and values.

However, my husband’s hot take was that a key point should be clarified. The true tale is that we’ve taken a journey together recognizing and discarding scripts handed to us by outside influences. We saw our parents and peers go to restaurant and exchange gifts to celebrate an anniversary. In our first few years, we followed this script. Until we recognized that it wasn’t bringing us enjoyment. Together we found better ways to celebrate that fit our style and gave ourselves permissions to set the script aside.

This mindset shows up in a lot of choices we make and it influences our approach to saving and spending money. We strive to think critically about the systems and conventions around us. When we recognize an outside influence that is not serving us well, we happily discard it. For us, this is a key aspect of financial freedom.

Here are some other ways we’ve broken with convention

• In our twenties, many of our friends were buying camps. It seemed like maybe something we wanted at the time, but upon reflection we could barely keep up with one house, let alone adding a second property. Renting is a better choice, if and when we want the camp experience.
  
• Retailers would love to see us spend money on Mother’s and Father’s day. Upon reflection, it felt like consumerism. We left celebrating these days up to our kids. We’ve never bought each other gifts on these occasions. Instead, we encourage the kids to do something nice for each other or spend time with us.
  
• Fast food restaurants would love to have us eating out every day, and we witnessed colleagues who order take out multiple times a day! Over time we found we preferred to plan and make meals at home. Now we won’t default to drive through and almost never order delivery.
  
• Almost everyone we know pays for multiple streaming service. When we last moved, we cancelled our music and video streaming subscriptions and have since realized we don’t really miss them. We did keep our subscription to Xbox Game Pass, as we both really enjoy it and use it every day.
  
• More than half the households I see have multiple cars. When we first were married we couldn’t afford a car. When we could, we realized we were happy to max out our total cars at one for the both of us to share.
  
• I have family members who are Costco VIP customers. In my early years I would have leaned in this direction as well. However, my husband has made me realize that the money would not stay in Canada. We prefer to avoid big bulk stores as they promote buying a lot of stuff you don’t really need. We try to buy Canadian when possible and lately we’ve been looking to buy things locally at a store rather than getting stuff direct shipped. We collaborate on most purchases. We talk about where a thing will live in our house before we buy it. We tend to shop only for what we need. If we have something we want, we plan ahead by keeping a list of stuff we want to buy in the future; we are not recreational shoppers.
  
• I know lots of people with more clothes than storage space. Our wardrobes are pretty minimal by comparison. We buy clothes only when we need to replace something. We aren’t afraid to buy quality, as we want things to last, but we also shop thrift stores.
  

These are just some of the ways we’ve become a little less conventional. I hope that by sharing our approach to life, that you might find clarity as we have.

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: 2026-07-31

A few weeks ago my husband looked up from his computer at me and said “It wasn’t supposed to be this easy.”

We were looking at our long term financial projections together and discussing future scenarios. The “It” he was referring to was retiring at the ripe old age of 45.

Was it easy? Kinda yeah, but also kinda no. When you are saving for the future the steps are basic.

Step 1: Save and invest money every month
Step 2: There is no step two.

That’s essentially all you need to do, when you boil it all down to basics.

To save, you must spend less than you make every month. Give every dollar a job by having a spending category for Future money. Be intentional with how much you want to commit every month and do this before you set your spending categories for discretionary stuff, like entertainment or eating out. Your Future money is transferred every month automatically to your savings and investments, like a bill you pay yourself. The best investments, in my opinion, are passive and are a balanced portfolio in a set ratio of growth stuff and safe stuff that is built on global markets with low fees.

Then you just rinse and repeat for a few decades or so. That’s really all we did.

However, while the steps are simple, the execution is not easy. We live in a world that is designed to make spending (and overspending) too easy and wants to turn us all into dissatisfied customers. The key to my family’s success has been to build in simple but effective systems that counter mindless consumerism.

The Systems that we Built

We’re both very systems oriented. We both like doing something better, or more efficiently, or simpler. So we used that to our advantage when it came to money.

Here are some of our systems that made living below our means feel easy.

#1 Meal Planning

For decades, we have taken time together to plan our meals for the upcoming week. We write down what meals we want every day and, as we write down the meal, we list out the ingredients we need to buy with a running tally of what each will cost. And, since we’re both computer nerds, I have spreadsheets back to January 1st 2010 to prove it. Go ahead and ask me what I had for dinner at any point between then and now. I likely can tell you, along with how much it cost to make!

Some of the benefits of meal planning include

• The cost of our weekly meals stay within our weekly food budget.
• Being intentional and agreeing on when to eat out; We like cooking at home together, so eating out or ordering in food is generally reserved for special occasions. What we make tastes better anyway!
• We plan to eat our leftovers and very, very, rarely throw away food.
• We work the current week’s sales into our plan and use that to guide what meals we will make.
• If you are feeling too busy or too lazy, you can copy last week’s meal plan and just tweak as needed. (or see what you ate two years ago and copy/paste that into this week)
• We plan our food around life events. We note down significant events in our weekly food plan so that we are planning food that is convenient based on time constraints and our location
• We spend time together making our food and sit together to eat it. This adds a lot of joy to our lives!
• We can meal prep for the week, if we want to. It’s sometimes easier to make a big batch of food on the weekend and portion it out for meals over the week.

#2 Planned Spending

We’ve operated from a spending plan (a.k.a budget) since we moved into our first apartment together. But a budget is not a system. The system is how we use our spending plan to make decisions together.

1. Build a budget that you can live on based on your income and expenses and commit to it.
2. Live life, spending money as planned.
3. When you get a raise, review the spending plan together and decide if you will save/invest more to reach your goals faster or allocate the money to specific budget line or a mix of those two choices.
4. When you want to make a life change, like finance a car or buy a house or move somewhere new, make a copy of your spending plan and plunk in the new numbers. Does the budget balance without sacrificing your saving and investing goals?

#3 Where is it going to live?

One of our house rules is that we won’t acquire stuff unless we already know where it’s going to be stored in our home. Sometimes that means we need to reduce other items to make room for new to us things. Sometimes it means we choose to not acquire the thing.

Our system is to set our intention to not own too many things, and then we check in with each other before making a purchase.

#4 Evaluating Joy

How much time working was required to afford the item you want? For example, how many hours of work did it take to afford eating at that restaurant? Did you enjoy it? Was it worth it?

Our system is to set our intention to appreciate our discretionary spending. We talk about money choices on a monthly basis and decide if there are spending habits we want to focus on or let go.

We don’t buy coffee, except on a road trips. We like the stuff we make at home, it doesn’t produce disposable waste, and it costs a fraction of buying from a shop.

When we were first married, I loved the idea of fresh flowers. They seemed like a luxury, and for a young couple living below to poverty line, they were! But over time, I found they were not bringing me joy in the same way anymore. I didn’t want flowers that lasted a week and then died. I preferred potted plants, which last longer and are less expensive over time.

We evaluate joy on the big stuff too. At one point, we considered buying a camp (a.k.a. cottage). But maintaining a second property would have been drudgery and would have required a significant chunk of our take home pay (which translated to time we would have had to commit to working). Through that lens, we knew renting a camp on occasion would bring us more joy than owning one.

#5 Fill up life with Free First

There are so many cool things to fill up your time with! If you want to spend less, so that you can save more, lean into filling up your calendar with free (or very low cost) stuff first. The “system” here is to be intentional; make a list of activities that you are looking forward to for the next season and then block in time in your calendar to do some of them. You may find that you are so busy with free/low cost activities that you really have to find time for any expensive excursions.

• Play cards
• Go to the library, Read books
• Practice yoga by following free YouTube videos
• Go on a hike with friends
• Take your kids and/or pets to the park
• Wander around your downtown
• Go to street fairs and festivals in your town
• Swim at a public beach
• Have a friend over for tea
• Host a table top game night
• Play free online games with friends
• Play D&D with friends
• Practice playing music or singing
• Draw or paint
• Go to an art gallery or a museum
• Learn a new language with a free app

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These are some of my systems that let me live more intentionally. What systems do you have?

Published: 2026-07-10

Budgeting is kinda like working out.

At first it sucks. A lot.

It takes time to build your money muscles.

But if you can keep showing up and putting in the work, eventually, you start to see the gains. And, eventually, you might even kinda, sorta, start to like it.

Starting a budget from scratch is work. Sticking to it is discipline. Fine tuning it is dedication.

Building your money muscles is important. You will depend on them to do the heavy lifting when it’s time to make life choices. From spending to saving to investing, these habits should be cultivated with care and intention.

But you can go to far. Like a body building who can barely turn their head anymore, you can over develop muscles and loose flexibility.

My husband and I may be at risk of over development. We’ve lived and thrived by assigning every dollar a job. We’ve fine tuned and adjusted out spending plan thoughtfully for decades. Generally it’s served us well. We discuss and negotiate changes to our spending plan at our monthly money meeting. We don’t impulse buy. We have mine and yours money. It’s structured. It’s simple. It’s a well oiled machine.

But it’s also a bit rigid. In our early marriage, we were focused on busting our debt. Then we started to focus on building our nest egg. We picked a lifestyle we were comfortable with and that kept our cost of living in line with our values and our goal to retire early.

The thing is, when you give every dollar a job and you want to retire early, you get pretty good at living without. We chose to be a one vehicle family. We chose to limit our holiday spending. If our clothing budget was maxed out, we chose to wait until there was room in the budget again to buy more stuff.

Living this way spills over to social life. We were generous with our time. We’ve always said yes to helping friends and family move. We’ve pitched in on home renos. We’ve helped dig garden beds and erect retaining walls. But we wouldn’t, as a general rule, be dropping by with a Timmies for everyone.

We found ways to work social spending into our budget. We hosted an annual boxing day house party. It was an all day open house and we offered food and drinks, inviting all our friends over to play cards and tabletop games. At our 25^th anniversary, we rented out the back of a pool hall, flew our daughter and her partner in, and hosted a pool tournament, covering everyone’s drink and food for the night. We love that style of generosity.

But smaller acts of generosity, until recently, did not have a place in our budget. The only bucket we had, was Miscellaneous Spending, which is our catch all money for everything from hand cream to rechargeable batteries. This meant we rarely spent money on small acts of kindness, mostly because it just wasn’t something that we thought about intentionally. Our money muscles were too puffed and our wallets just were not flexible in that way.

It’s been on my mind recently. I want to be less transactional and feel freer to perform small acts of kindness. I believe your planned spending is a reflection of your values. Value cars? Your budget will illustrate that. Value clothes? Your budget will prove it. Value eating out? You budget will show that too.

I want to be someone who can fund small acts of kindness and I want my budget to show it.

So, last month, I proposed that we add a Generosity line to our planned spending budget. We agreed to have a modest amount available to allow us to be generous in a spontaneous way. It’s early days, but we’ve both already dipped into our generosity fund on separate occasions, which was great. However, we didn’t spend it to zero, indicating that we have room to stretch ourselves more. We need to build up that money muscle.

We will continue to work at it, and I will keep you posted.

How does generosity show up in your life?

Published: 2026-06-21