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: 2026-09-18

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: 2026-07-31

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: 2026-05-10

This is post #5 in my Life of Pie series. If you’ve new here, I recommend that you read two posts before jumping into this series. Building Your Financial House gives you a high level picture of healthy finances, and I’m Ready Now What? includes actions to prep you for the posts in this series. I recommend that you jump back to those posts once you’re ready to begin making positive changes in your life!

Here are my previous posts in this series:

• Life of Pie: Housing
• Life of Pie: Transportation
• Life of Pie: Debt
• Life of Pie: Future

We’ve come to our fifth and final slice of pie, which I call Life. The Life slice is everything not already accounted for in your spending plan. It includes food, alcohol, holiday spending, gifts, clothing, subscriptions, vacations, and everything else you spend money on.

If you’ve been keeping track of your portion sizes, you will already know that your Life slice target size is 25% of your total income. If you haven’t already, you should now update your spending plan and add a Life category. If you are using the MWM Budget Tracker the beginner and normal modes are there by default.

As I’ve mentioned before, your spending plan may not completely match our Money Wise Mom targets. However, here are some guidelines to help give you some perspective.

• Under 25% – It’s unlikely that you spend less than 25% on Life unless you’re doing it intentionally. We all need to live and we all like our creature comforts. We exist in a consumerist world and from the moment we open our eyes and check our phones to when our head hits the pillow at night, we are inundated with ads and nudges designed to make us spend, spend, spend!
  
  To be clear, spending your money on Life is a good thing. Everyone needs balance and this category has the power to bring you joy beyond the bare necessities. Spending under 25% is an indicator that you are restricting your budget.
  
  If you are in debt and motivated to bust it fast, you might restrict your life spending voluntarily for a set period of time. It’s okay to grind it out, as long as you have a clear debt repayment plan with a defined timeline. Typically I recommend creating a debt payment plan you can achieve in three years or less. If you want to grind, I feel that more than 12 months of restricted spending becomes unsustainable.
  
  There is one other situation that warrants intentionally reducing your Life spending. If you find yourself in a financial emergency, like losing your primary income, the Life category is the one with the most fat to trim. If you’re between jobs, you might shift from a normal spending plan to an emergency spending plan, which is designed to stretch your emergency fund for as long as possible. Cutting out gifts, holiday spending, vacations, and other optional things will give you more time to find another source of income.
  
• Over 25% – Overspending on Life may indicate that you are doing really well or that the roof of your financial house is on fire. We have to look to the other slices of your pie to get the full picture. If your housing and/or transportation spending is low and you have no debt, those slices will be reduced and you might redirect those dollars into Life. You should also have a healthy grasp on your Future slice and be saving and investing wisely. Do not screw over your future self so that you can eat out every day. Remember, you are looking for balance.
  
  Alternatively, if you spend over 25% on Life and you have debt or your Future slice is missing, your financial house is on fire! It’s time for action. You need to get your budget in order and you must change your spending habits. Failing to do this means you cannot not have a happy, balanced, financial life.
  

To Track or Not To Track

You probably will not be surprised when I tell you that I am a tracker. I like spreadsheets and goals and projections. Since I was a teenager I’ve tracked my spending. If you are like me, you will want an app or a spreadsheet and you will enjoy taking the time categorize where all your money goes every month.

However, maybe you are not like me. Perhaps tracking your spending is a habit that just doesn’t work for you. If that’s the case, I recommend you simplify your spending system.

For me and my husband, we buy all our life stuff on a credit card that gives us 2% cash back. We always pay our monthly balance in full. We do not pay credit card interest.

Note: If you are beginner level, this method is not for you. Even I, who’s been tracking money closely for over 30 years, can get surprised at how big the credit card bill is when it arrives.

We host our own budget tracking software called Actual Budget (we’ve used simple spreadsheets and other apps in the past) which is not perfect but it allows us to categorize every transaction and all the data is stored locally. We pay a small annual fee for a third party service called SimpleFIN which acts as a bridge between our budget software and our credit and bank accounts. SimpleFIN allows us to import every transaction into Actual Budget on demand. We don’t need to use SimpleFIN, as we could manually import all our transactions, however, theoretically, it’s saving us time and hassle. Honestly though, how much time and hassle saved is debatable – all our financial accounts have multi factor authentication enabled which SimpleFIN cannot bypass which IS a hassle and takes time.

Anyways, if you are not into tracking every transaction there is an incredibly simple and fool proof method to ensure you do not overspend. Some people call it the jar method and some people call it the envelope method.

The Jar Method

When we were in our debt busting years, we followed the Jar Method. It’s a simple system where you live on cash. It is impossible to overspend if you follow this method correctly. The basic approach is this

1. When you get paid, you withdraw the 25% that you are planning to spend on Life
2. Put the money in a jar on top of your fridge
3. Spend this money for life stuff
   • If you spend all the money, you have to wait until next month!
   • If you have money left over, you can leave it to accumulate and spend it in the future

You only need one jar but I recommend that you have a few to balance your spending. Our big categories are Vacations, Food, Clothing, Gifts, Christmas, Roller Derby, Entertainment (his and hers), and Misc Spending. We do not take a vacation every month, however we allocate money to this category every month until it’s pooled up enough to use.

If you want to go above and beyond, place receipts spent into the jar. Then once a month, before you replenish the cash, take out all your receipts and jot down in your budget tracker where the money went. This is a simple step if you want to start tracking your spending. You may also be amazed at how quickly you forget what you bought over the past four weeks!

If you are not a fan of living on cash, you could simulate the jar method by moving 25% of your pay to a separate bank account and spend it from there. Some institutions allow you to have multiple accounts or allow you to “earmark” money into categories inside one savings account. The key is that you move only the 25% amount that you plan to spend down over the next 30 days.

How Rich Do You Feel?

How you feel about your money is a shifty thing. Feeling like you don’t have enough money sucks. The Life slice can get pretty emotional. The key is to be intentional with your spending. Want to know a trick that’s served us well over the years? Any time we adjust our Life budget, we ask ourselves “What would make us feel rich?”. Once upon a time, we had debt to pay off and low income and therefore, no room for alcohol in our budget. Eventually we busted our debt and earned more. We then got to sit down together and decide where to up our spending. Yeehaw! Going from nothing to something felt luxurious!

We also periodically trim back on spending that we no longer care about. At some point, we agreed that eating out didn’t really bring us joy. So we ditched planning to spend on that but planned a good sized food budget so that we could eat out once in a blue moon but make yummy meals at home together, which we loved.

Your spending habits and priorities will change over time. Your spending plan should be updated as well to put more money towards things that bring you joy and limit or remove spending that you no longer care about.

Published: 2026-05-08

My husband and I are a little too good at the marshmallow test. By which I mean, we can take our natural skills in delayed gratification a bit too far.

The marshmallow test, in case you’re not familiar, is a psychology experiment from the 70s that studied delayed gratification in 6 year old kids. If kids were able to restrain themselves from eating treats while unsupervised for a period of time, they would earn double their rewards. Or “fail” the test and eat their treat early and get no extra treats, screwing over their future selves.

If you think about this in terms of personal finance, it’s basically the power to wait until you can afford something before you buy it. In today’s world of credit cards, pay day loans, lines of credit, and online buy-now-pay-later services, there are so many ways to buy things before you can afford. Lenders want to make your buying experience as frictionless as possible to allow them to make money while you to treat yourself to x, y, and z product.

But like those eager kids who ate the treat early, paying for stuff with credit that you cannot afford is screwing over your future self. Debt is an anchor that drags you down. It slows down the rate at which you can reach your financial goals. In the worst scenario, it can take goals completely off the table for you. Interest payments on debt are a bill that you are handing over to your future self, who will have to work harder and longer to pay more for the treat that you get to enjoy today. Buying stuff feels good in the moment. Since the interest bill comes later, most people don’t quantify the true cost of stuff that they put on a credit card. When they don’t pay their balance in full before the grace period, interest is the hidden tax on everything you buy. Canadians know that you always have to round up the price tag to include sales taxes. However, with sales tax you know the exact percentage you need to factor in. With credit card interest, how much you pay depends on how long until the debt is paid off. At an average credit card interest rate of 20%–25%, a purchase will cost double in approximately 3 to 4 years if you only make minimum payments. Oof! Was that $8 sub that you bought today really worth making your future self pay $16 for? And do you really still want to be paying for it years from now?

Nature vs Nurture

So how does delayed gratification show up in my life and when did it start? As a teenager I remember choosing to walk halfway across the city to save $0.50 on bus fare. As I became a young adult, I remember comparison shopping for the cheapest shoes I could find and frequenting thrift stores. My ability to budget and save was strong as a kid.

It wasn’t until I moved out at the tender age of 18 that I started to flirt with debt. By that time I was already a mom, having had my daughter at 17. Originally I moved out on my own, but it was only a matter of months until my daughter’s father (now my husband) joined me and we became an instant family of three, living below the poverty line.

A lot of new adult expenses (rent, transportation, food, etc.) coupled with access to new forms of credit (credit cards, store cards, and student loans) was a dangerous cocktail. We often lived in overdraft, for which I could tell myself that “we had no choice”. Perhaps, perhaps not. We lived simply, but we did buy stuff on credit instead of waiting. We bought a stereo before we could purchase it out right (no one needs a stereo). We didn’t eat out often, but we did sometimes. We bought each other birthday and Christmas presents. We had pets, which made life more expensive than it needed to be. Nothing too extreme, but when you’re poor, even small stuff can drive you into a cycle of debt. When you don’t have a lot and can’t see a brighter future, buying things that you just want is seductive. Especially things that you can’t afford and, deep down, you know you shouldn’t buy. It’s like eating cookies when you’re on a diet. When willpower cracks, you can tell yourself all sorts of things to justify that sweet treat. But you always have to deal with the sugar hang over the next day.

It’s a Money Muscle

It was 5 or 6 years later when we finally got serious with our money. At our “rock bottom” we had a mortgage, a HeLoc, a student loan, and over $10k in consumer debt.

We were in our mid twenties when we finally decided we were done with debt. We wanted it gone and we needed a plan. We needed to bulk up our money muscles. To do that, we built our household budget based on our goal to become debt free. We allocated every extra penny to paying off our debts asap. Our early budget was pretty extreme. At one point (maybe early 2000s?) our monthly household budget was $20 for entertainment. Woohoo. Yes, that’s household (with two kids), not per person. We didn’t have any budget allocated for alcohol (that was a need, not a want); I remember buying my husband a case of beer for his Christmas present as a big treat. We didn’t have money to buy xbox games, so we would rent them for a fraction of the cost. We spent many hours at the library and would all read for entertainment. It definitely wasn’t glamorous, but we had a good life and we were putting our future selves first. And, as the debt balances came down, it actually felt good to live without. We stopped using all credit cards. We prioritized doing things for free. We loved our local libraries. We went to the park. We were finally winning the marshmallow test.

How that showed up in our children

My kids were between 2 and 7 when we started our debt free journey. For them, I think watching us be intentional with our money is all that they’ve ever known. And today, both my kids are extremely proficient budgeters. Like, extremely proficient – to the point that, sometimes I wonder if we broke them a little bit.

Of course, I say that tongue in cheek! I see them flexing money budgeting muscles all the time and it brings me joy. As MoneyWiseMom, I’m extremely proud of my kids and how they make the most of their money. They budget for big expenses. They don’t overspend at the holidays. They second hand shop. When they take on debt, like student loans, they pay it off aggressively. They live below their means and save for their futures.

What could be wrong with be intentional with money?

The Dark Side of Extreme Frugality

As life went on, our financial lives naturally improved. We stuck to our budget, crushed the debt, and started investing. Along the way, we advanced in our careers and started to earn raises and bonuses. When our income went up, we would revisit our household budget and allocate money intentionally, based on our current life goal, to up our budget. We would ask ourselves, how should we up our budget so that we feel “rich”. Our lux categories were entertainment, alcohol, and vacations (no surprise as these are the categories that were heavily constrained early on in our marriage!). And because we lived so constrained for so long, even a small bump in these line items felt amazing! What do you mean we can just go to the movies? How rich are we, lol?

Fast Forward to Today

Over the past year, we’ve done a major life reset. Just over a year ago, I left my high paying tech job and intentionally left the workforce to live a life of financial independence (what can I say, all that saving and investing really worked!). As part of our big life reset, we choose to go back to basics with a pretty frugal budget. In 2024, we didn’t think twice about eating out or how much we spent at the grocery store. Today, we thoughtfully plan our meals and shop based on sales. We choose to go back to feeling a wee bit constrained so that we would focus on people and experiences over money and things.

And we may be a little too good at it. We currently have a pretty humble budget for miscellaneous expenses. We draw on that money for extras, like when buying a new cell phone or kitchen gadget. We’ve keep a list of things we want to buy next. It has about ten items on it right now. At the current rate, it will take years to build up the money to go out and buy all that stuff.

Our tendency to “just wait” to buy things may be bit out of wack. Two weeks ago, we decided that only having one cutting board was not working for us. This week, I finally convinced my husband to just get a second one, even though we’re overspent on our misc exp budget right now. And even though we were “going wild” just buying it, he still flexed his frugal money muscles and found one for half off in the Ikea “As Is” section. Which I fully support, by the way. It was the right purchase for the right amount and we shopped to our values by choosing a bamboo cutting board that was the right size for what we wanted and I know that it will be used every week for years to come! And of course, we’re still going to pay off our full credit card balance this month. We haven’t paid credit card interest in decades, and we won’t be going back to that old life.

Final Thoughts

In our mid forties, we discovered that we still had our money muscles that we developed up in our twenties. But the dark side is, we might over built those muscles at the expense of flexibility. I know that today sometimes we stress ourselves out sticking exactly within budget. In truth, our budget is an arbitrary rule we’ve created for ourselves. We value a stress free life and we’re still working on finding the right balance that works for us. But it’s a pretty great life and I wouldn’t really want it any other way.

Published: 2026-05-01

This is post #4 in my Life of Pie series. If you’ve new here, I recommend that you read my previous post Building Your Financial House, which gives you a high level picture of healthy finances, and then I’m Ready Now What?, which preps you for the posts in this series. I recommend that you jump back to those posts once you’re ready to begin making positive changes in your life!

Here are my previous posts in this series:

• Life of Pie: Housing
• Life of Pie: Transportation
• Life of Pie: Debt

The Future slice, IMHO, is the best slice of all the slices! This one has the power to change your life for the better and in a really big way. Your Future slice includes your safety net (a.k.a. your emergency fund) and your investments, which is how you grow your money engine. Your money engine allows your future self, one day, to stop trading their time for money (a.k.a. working). In between saving for disasters and saving for financial independence, you might also choose to save for major expenses like a down payment on a house or post secondary education. Everything in this slice is about building a better future. How cool is that?

Some key concepts for success.

• Funding your future is not negotiable. Even if you have debt, you save. This is the path to a balanced financial life.
• Your savings are a monthly bill that you pay yourself. Automate it so that it comes out of your spending account the day after you get paid.
• Keep your Emergency Fund in a separate, no fee, high interest savings account. There are many to choose from, just do a quick search online.
• Never do anything with your savings that you don’t understand. That includes sending it to “some money guy” who “handles” all your investing for you.
• Money + Time is magic! Compound interest is the growth that you need in your life. If you are not putting money aside now, you are missing out in a major way.

Choose Your Level

This slice comes in beginner, normal, and advanced modes.

Beginner: If you have debt, your financial house is on fire, and prioritizing getting rid of it forever is critical. But setting up your Emergency Fund is also critical, as is putting money away now for your future self. Your strategy should be do a little of all these things, as they are all important. Once you are out of debt, you can contribute to your future in a more meaningful way. In Beginner Mode, your target for Future is 10%.

Reality Check: I want to add a note here for those who are struggling. If you can get your financial life in balance and your Life of Pie slices are relatively on target, then great! However, I’ve lived below the poverty line and I’ve had to survive on overdraft (so gross, I know!). I know that sometimes after covering the essentials, money can be impossibly tight. I urge you to do what you can, no mater how little. During our tightest times, we put a meager $20 a month away in our emergency fund. Savings is a muscle. Just like going to the gym, the most important thing is to show up and do what you can. Showing up for your future means putting something away every month. If it’s very small, your goal will be to increase that amount as your financial life improves. Focus on ways to reduce expenses and increase your income to get your Future slice up to at least beginner mode.

Normal: When you are debt free, you have the power to supercharge your future! You can now divert the 15% that would have gone to debt payments to yourself! Huzzah!

Advanced: Do you recall how I said in Life of Pie: Housing that “Life is squishy, and your pie will likely never be 100% perfect.”? Once you’ve got your financial life dialed in, you might explore increasing your Future slice to be even bigger! The bigger this slice, the faster you reach your goals. This is not required for a healthy financial life, but for me, understanding this option was a game changer and it allowed my husband and I to reach financial independence by the time we were each 45. If this sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to read the blog post that changed my life in a big way “The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement” by Mr. Money Moustache. It’s his writings that educated me the most and opened my eyes to an alternative lifestyle that really resonated with my value system. In our most plush days, my husband and I would squirrel away around 60% of our income to Future (a.k.a our investments). The key is, in your working years you always save at least 10%-25%. However, as you win at life, you can choose to reduce other slices and put even more. You get to decide for yourself how much is enough.

Cool Story, Bro. Now What?

The deeper strategies on how to allocate your future savings warrants it’s own post. For now, you should accomplish three actions

1. Update your spending plan based on whichever “mode” fits your life right now. If you are using the MWM Budget Tracker the beginner and normal modes are there by default.
   
2. Setup a separate no fee, high interest, savings account for your emergency savings. If you don’t know or have investments, then just shove all your Future money into savings for now.
   
3. Automate your savings. If you have a regular pay day, schedule a transfer to your savings account a day or two after it hits your spending account.

Now give yourself a high five and go play some video games! You did great things today.

Published: 2026-03-16

Cool, you just read my last blog post building your financial house and you’re ready to “get better at money”! But what now?

Rest assured, we will dive into our first pillar, which is our spending plan, in due course. Before we deep dive into that topic, let’s set you up for success. Here are a few tips and a little bit of homework so that when we start building our spending plan, you will really be ready to go.

Set Yourself Up for Success

Your calendar is a reflection of what matters to you. If you care about fitness, you will have dedicated time for activities that make you sweat. If you care about your friends, you might have a standing monthly brunch meetup. The same is true for money. If you want to get serious about your money, you’re going to start setting aside time to deal with it.

Prep Work

1. Block out 1 hour of focus time
   
   • Pick a time when you will have the energy to focus and a place to work that is distraction free.
     
     Pro Tip #1: When planning focus time, be realistic and be intentional. Planning to dive into money stuff at 8pm on Thursday night after an exhausting day is not ideal.
     
     Pro Tip #2: Commit to focus time. Set your phone to do not disturb and shutdown your email. I have a timer on my phone called “Focus Time” which helps me remain dedicated to the planned task and pulls me out when my time is up.
     
     
   • Pick a location. Choose a quiet spot where you can truly focus. If you can access most of you financial information from a personal laptop or your phone, you might go to the library for an hour. Or, consider heading into work early one day. Or simply find a room at home where you can shut the door. The key is to find a distraction free location, just know that you will need access to your financial accounts and bills.
     
     
   • Book it in. Now let’s make it official and add it to your calendar. Call it “MWM Homework Day 0”. Do it now. I will wait.
     

MWM Homework Day 0 – Gathering Intel

You did it! You dedicated time to “get better with money”. Don’t forget to set your focus timer and let’s begin.

1. Create a worksheet. Either on a piece of paper or create a new spreadsheet.
   
2. Create a section for Income
   
   • Write down your monthly net income.
     
     • If you get a salary with a relatively stable pay cheque, you just need a recent pay-stub. Or check deposits made to your bank account.
     • If you have a variable income (tips, gig work, varying hours), I recommend that you grab your last 12 months of income (pay stubs, invoices, income transactions from your bank account). Add up the 12 months and divide by 12. This gives you a reasonable number to expect on a monthly basis.
       • You know your situation best. Your goal is pick a reasonable monthly income that you can safely expect to earn every month.
     • If you are in a household with multiple earners, jot down the income for each person separately. If you don’t know what their income is, make a follow up action item for yourself. You need to gather this information to make a spending plan for your household.
     • For many people, income from employment may be their only source. If you have other income streams (dividends from investments, rental income, government grants or programs, spousal support, etc.) add entries for these as well. If these are not regular monthly amounts, you can add up what you would have received over the past 12 months and divide by 12 to give you a monthly estimate to work with for now.
       
3. Below is the list of information you are going to gather. This is a generic list, so skip any information that is not applicable to you. For example, if you don’t own a car, you will skip “Car Insurance”. You will find this information in physical documents or digital copies.
   
   For each item in this list, add an entry on your worksheet with the monthly value. If something is paid annually, either make note of that or use the divide by 12 trick to estimate your monthly expense.
   
   • Monthly rental or mortgage payment (you likely can jot this down off the top of your head, but if you’re unsure, check your bank transactions)
   • Condo or Homeowner Association (HOA) Fees
   • Home or Tenant Insurance Bill
   • Automobile Insurance bill
   • Car loan(s) (either from a monthly statement, your original loan schedule, or the per-authorized transaction from your bank transactions)
   • Other transportation costs. For each of these ones, total up your bank transactions from the last 3 months and divide by 3.
     • Transit Costs (bus, Uber, train, metro, taxi, Lyft, Uride, etc)
     • Fuel or EV charging costs )
     • Tolls
     • Parking Fees
   • One recent utility bill for Water, Hydro/Electricity, Gas, and household Internet
   • Your last statements for all your credit accounts. Remember to include
     • Credit cards (Visa/Mastercard)
     • Retail store charge cards
     • Pay day loan statements
     • Medical debt payments
     • Personal loans (jot down the total amount you owe and what you pay back monthly)
     • A list of any buy now, pay later outstanding balances. (BNPL, Pay in 4, Afterpay, Klarna, Affirm, Sezzle, Zip)
   • A recent mobile phone bill

Stop the clock, you’re done! Give yourself a HUGE pat on the back for the amazing work! I’m very proud of you. That was a lot of deep dive work and I know gathering all that information can be daunting. Keep worksheet intel handy; we’ll be using them to build a spending plan to check if your money life is in balance.

Published: 2026-03-08

If you want to build an awesome life, you need to build an awesome house. Financially speaking.

Let’s think about your financial house from a bird’s eye view. Let’s fly way way way up and then turn to peer down at the ground. Can you see your house? I can. It’s a beautifully carved marble building on a lush field of green and yellow. It’s sturdy and strong and secure. It’s built to last the ages. And it’s based on four pillars.

The pillars of your financial house are:

1. A Spending Plan – Live within a spending plan that allocates a healthy balance of money for housing, transportation, life, future, and, if needed, debt busting.
   
2. Emergency Savings – A multi layer safety net to protect yourself from unforeseen events that risk bringing down your financial house.
   
3. Zero Debt – Debt is an anchor that drags you down. You need to bust all high interest consumer debt as quickly as you can. Save yourself!
   
4. Investments – Buy a diversified portfolio – as much as you can afford, every month, without fail, into boring stuff that has low management fees. We’ll talk about knowing what you can afford in a future post!

These four focus areas are your building blocks for financial security.

Zooming out paints the picture of what you want and creates the blueprint of what you need. With your blueprint in hand, your next steps will be to zoom in and start building from your plan. In future posts, I’ll help you construct each pillar, methodically and systematically.

But, for now, don’t over think it! Enjoy the view and know that once all these pieces are in place, you will have put your financial house in order.

As a closing thought, let me mention that, on top of our four pillars, stands financial independence (FI). People reach FI when their investments provide more income than their projected expenses. If they accomplish this surplus before the generally accepted age of retirement, they can retire early (RE). This is the basis for FIRE, an extreme personal finance movement, which marries FI with RE. Online discussions concerning FIRE include big feelings and heated debates. The great news is that you don’t need to choose right now if you want to pursue FIRE. By building your financial house based on the pillars I’ve listed above, you’ve created a foundation for FIRE, should you ever want to pursue it! The only difference is that you would adjust your spending plan to focus more on the future to make investing a priority over spending.