Yearly Expense Fund

We all have those monthly expenses that we might budget for, but there are those annual expenses we sometimes don’t have the money for. I found that the yearly house insurance bill, vet bill, softener rental bills,etc.. can be a challenge to pay for when you haven’t planned for them. I normally don’t have hundreds of extra dollars just sitting in my chequing account ready to pay my house insurance.

My solution is to use a savings account at INGDIRECT.ca. Once you have an account with them set up, you can open up additional accounts with in a matter of moments. Having multiple accounts lets you save for multiple goals. I use one of my accounts for my yearly expense fund.

My yearly expense fund setup isn’t exactly highly technical. I simply add up all my annual expenses that we pay each year. So in my case, that might mean needing $1800 a year to cover these expenses. I add a little extra to the amount to be safe and divide the total by 12 to come up with a monthly total. I then set up an automatic deposit in that ING account for that monthly amount.

Obviously this works best if you can either start with some ‘seed money’ to get the account off the ground, or try to start at a time of year where you have less annual expenses to pay (if there ever is such a time). Once you get enough money into this account (hopefully the entire year’s amount at some point), you should have enough money to pay for those annual expenses without having to scramble for extra money.

www.airmilesshops.ca

Not sure how I missed this one. We like to collect airmiles in our house, and I haven't been taking advantage of the fact I can use www.airmilesshops.ca to earn airmiles from even more online shopping sites. I was aware of the website, but never really took the time to understand its benefits.

Up to this point, shopping at Safeway has provided the bulk of our airmiles we've been rewarded with. We also earn a reasonable sum from using an airmiles credit card. I've found that collecting airmiles from purchases such as gas at Shell is a slow process, and really doesn't amount to much compared to Safeway. With www.airmilesshops.ca, we'll be able to earn miles from places we order from like Amazon, Land's End, LL Bean, and others. More miles from us for purchases we were making already.

My fellow, frugal co-worker put me on to shopping at www.airmilesshops.ca