Our FI Nest

Or click bait title - How I saved $475 with this road trip meal plan! We recently got back from a 8 day trip to the Okanagan with a stop in Kamloops for a wedding. My food planning goal was to eat well and avoid fast food dining and focus our eating out budget to eating at a couple nice restaurants. It's still vacation after all and eating out is a fun part of that. We just wanted to focus that enjoyment to local restaurants.  Overall we did pretty well, only stopping once for Tim Horton's coffee, once to McDonald's for lunch and final dinner at Boston Pizza on the last leg of our journey. So some of the old stand-bys did win out while travelling. I keep hoping to have fun picnics in beautiful parks, but our travel days recently have either been smoke filled or rainy! Total Restaurant Spending:$292 Tim Hortons : $4 (coffee) McDonalds: $10 (ice cream) Lunch at Canada Day: $40 Jammery: $78 (Breakfast) The Train Station: $88 (Dinner) McDonalds: $40 (lunch) Boston P

Our spending re-caps for the months will focus only on our variable spending and include the following categories: Family (includes all the stuff we spend on the kids such as activities anything we buy them and their education savings. Any graphs I may post with include daycare, but the numbers will not) Home Expenses (anything we spend on the house for the maintenance, taxes and insurance. I'm not including mortgage payments or interest as that will not be included in our final FI number so I want to be able to track what life costs without that. Keep in mind graphs will include the mortgage, but not in the numbers) Transportation (all car related expenses such as gas, maintenance, insurance) Utilities (heat, water, electricity, Internet, phone and cell phones) Health Spending (Life insurance, dentist other health related costs. This is pretty low because we live in Canada) Enjoyment (Gifts, Entertainment, Vacations, Hobbies, Restaurants, Alcohol, etc.) Routine Expenses (