My approach to personal budgeting

Keeping in line with the last post, I wanted to talk about my personal experience with budgeting.

Disclaimers :-), I'm not a fiduciary or a personal finance expert, there are a myriad of people online giving really good financial advice like Dave Ramsey. If you want specific customized advice I strongly recommend getting a financial adviser, in Canada there are certified portfolio managers, to review your position and help you plan for your goals.

Over the years I've kept myself sane with a few processes and a specific tool called Buxfer*. When I went looking for software a few years ago I was still living in Barbados and since local banks don't connect to the information sharing services that North American banks do, it was difficult to synchronize my information. Buxfer has always had a robust import function and for a relatively small fee did forecasting so it suited my needs. The time saved was enough for me to shift from updating a spreadsheet on a monthly basis and eventually I wrote a macro to help automate the process.

From a process perspective I keep a few budget buckets:

• Transportation
• Food
• Groceries
• Entertainment
• Misc
• Joint (the marriage tax)

Those combined with pre-planned expenses (Recurring monthly/annual bills) create my expected spend per month and with the forecast tool I can then estimate if my spending is over/under my income during that period. The budget tool also helps, and I imagine this is standard in budgeting software, by giving an 'expected' vertical line that gives a rough idea if spending is on track.

I also forecast out on individual accounts to have an idea of how much, for example, my credit card balance will potentially be on a specific day. This lets pick a saving target for a month up front based on money I'm most likely going to spend instead of spending and then saving the remainder. It's not as good as the 'pay yourself first' model but that automatically happens for retirements savings. This approach allows me to save a target amount plus extra so if unexpected expenses pop up the following month, or two months later, there is buffer. I've found personally simply paying myself first is too rigid beyond retirement saving and then spending the 'extra' money I could have saved is more tempting.

The budget 'buckets' are the ways I account for spending money in a somewhat predictable manner but again not too rigidly. So my budget for food is say $100, I may spend more than that and it's OK if overall my spend is low but if I go over my total budget then chances are I won't meet my minimum saving goal for a month. 

So my overall approach allows me to figure out if a purchase beyond my usual spending will put me in a difficult situation and when I can make it, if it all. It helps me save when I can and helps me understand how I'm spending my money to determine if I need to make changes. 

Getting this to make sense will take a few swings so I'll leave this here for now and for the next parts I'll probably:

1. Setting up pre-planned expenses and expense categorization (budget buckets)
2. Creating goals/plans and updating my budget
3. Forecasting and decision making

* Full disclosure if you click the link and do sign up I get a whopping $1 of upgrade credit.

Marriage Tax

I've been married since August 4th, 2012. I am very opinionated and can be very strong/wrong headed about my spending and my wife is also very opinionated. One thing we've been reasonably able to avoid arguing about over the last 7+ years is money.

We discuss it often and as in any household it can be the source of concern and anxiety but those feelings are derived from our collective positions. In terms of me spending money on computer parts or her on skin care products, those are private to the individual and the approach we've used for this is what we call a 'marriage tax'.

It's been in place from day 1 of our marriage and it became more formal in May 2013 when we started sending 'joint emails'. A monthly email from one spouse to the other logging any transactions that were spent from joint so we could refer back to them later if there was any confusion.

The systems works like this:

• We agreed a percentage that would be transferred from our salaries once a month to our joint bank account. A marriage tax
• The percentage is based on net salaries after pre-tax deductions.
• The percentage can be moved up or down on mutual agreement.
• Purchases over a certain dollar figure, it used to be $50 BBD but largely anything expected to come out of the joint account is mentioned now.
• Salary bonuses are not subject to the tax. 

It's fairly simple, the other factor is what can be purchased with joint, these are all pretty obvious:

• Rent
• Groceries (with a few exceptions)
• Childcare 
• Family outings
• etc.

We chose to use a percentage because if one of our salaries went up or down the contribution to joint would change accordingly. The spirit of it being if one person does better the household does better so we both benefit but whoever got the increase still benefits the most because their disposable income in real dollars has increased.

What it means in practicality is that a portion of money goes to an account and it pays for expenses that arise from living in a shared space. This means the remaining money can be spent effectively however that person wants to. As a result we budget as a couple and then as individuals. I have an entertainment bucket in my budget app for things I'll purchase like tickets to a TFC games and when I do so it's, at least financially,  up to me. 

Given 'Joint' isn't a person and isn't eligible for things like a credit score etc. We spend money on behalf of joint, and somewhat like business expenses they are claimed out of the joint fund. This system is not perfect and joint has had both surpluses and short falls. Ultimately the greatest benefit is simplicity of budgeting for a family while respecting the individuality of both spouses and when salaries increase or decrease, the amount going into joint does and lifestyles adjust accordingly.

Planning for the Move to Canada, my perspective

Changing country of residence is a big decision and for moving to Canada there are so many things that need to happen as part of the application, invitation to apply and confirmation of permanent residence processes. This is all an objective process but there are subjective elements, for example the question of whether you should even move in the first place. My last post was objective, factual and process based. This will be more subjective and coloured by my own personal experience.

There was one question, personally, that drove my decision: Will moving improve the quality of life for my family?

Moving to Canada from Barbados

I moved from Barbados to Canada on a work permit early in 2018 and subsequently became a permanent resident this year. I've had the conversation a few times with friends about the process, specifically with respect to coming from Barbados, and I wanted to share what I knew more definitively.

Scotia and Spreadsheets

I've been a Scotia Bank Barbados customer for a while and I like their AA rewards card. They are by no means perfect and my biggest gripe is the lack of a function that allows an easy export to Excel.

Getting my transactions in a spreadsheet format saves me a lot of time, I use an app/web service to budget and manually entering transactions is a pain. I could complain, and to some people I would, but I figured why not try to come up with a resolution.

So HERE is a spreadsheet that should allow you to just copy the online version of the statement and it will output a clean new sheet with the transactions.

The steps go something like this:
1. Go to the month view (not the 10 day view) in Account Activity of Scotia's Online banking.
2. Select the relevant text and copy. Should look like the image below, don't select titles of the columns just the rows.

3. Open the spreadsheet and go through the notifications.

In the below click Enable Editing.

You can view the certificate if you're so inclined to verify it was created by by bbwalcotts email and click Edit Anyway and then Click Enable Content.

4. Hit "Paste Values from Website". A new spreadsheet should appear with the tidied up values.

5. Close the conversion spreadsheet without saving it so it can be reused.

Free Certificate Store

First post in a while, hope to be a bit more regular with stuff I find useful or interesting. 

So a quick one then. As you can see above I've moved over to a domain I was using for email for a while. So the blogs is not mjwalcott.blogspot.com but mw.bbwalcotts.com, which I think is a bit simpler and more personal.

Onto the purpose of creating the post! I finally tried to attach a Digital ID onto the email associated with bbwalcotts and with a little struggle you can sign Outlook emails and Excel documents with a few relatively steps (there are over 15 steps embeded in the two below).

1.  Go here to get a free Comodo certificate but use Internet Explorer. Not Edge, not Chrome etc. IE11 (I'm on Windows 10 so I used Edge at first.). I found this tip here. Follow the instructions and the install should be fine.
2.  Then you can install the certificate as shown here.

Whole thing should take 10 minutes with any luck and knowing that IE11 is the key to properly installing that certificate.

Logitech Media Keys for Google Play Music

Short post,

I have the Logitech K360 Keyboard and running setpoint so I can keep flip my function keys in addition to mapping the buttons on my M560 mouse. Looked into controlling the Google Play Music web app, long story short I used:
StreamKeys
and the following Setpoint Hack to enable control through the keyboard media keys while using Setpoint.