How I'm Able To Save 52% Of My Income In 2024 - My New Savings Goal & Investment Strategy

it's my favorite time of the year AKA it's a start of a new year which means a fresh start reset of the financial goals all that good stuff it's actually really funny cuz there's technically no difference at all between December 31st and January 1st than there is between any other two days in a row but it really does feel different so I'm going to be capitalizing off of that now this also means that it's time for my favorite video of the Year where I get to look back at how everything went with my money over the past 12 months but also what I'm planning on changing up and aiming for in 2024 now when I look back at the past year it was actually a pretty good year from a money perspective if you've been following along for a little while now you would know that a few years ago back when I graduated University I had a corporate 9 to-5 job I worked in HR now 2 and 1 half years ago almost exactly I quit that job which is crazy time goes by really fast and then I've been self-employed ever since then now between just being in my early 20s trying to figure out life to then starting to save and invest money to then completely changing up my career path and now for the last few years figuring out what being self-employed really means it's been just very up and down and every year has some sort of major change so it's kind of nice that this year well first of all I feel like life is always going to have those ups and downs of course but it is kind of nice that this year was a little more steady a little more according to plan from that perspective okay so we're going to get into covering the specifics I'm going to tell you guys exactly how much I saved this year how much I invested all the specific numbers but also really focused on looking forward to what the plan is for next year in 2024 but first I want to go make a coffee cuz I feel like that's definitely a must for this video [Music] all right so one of the biggest changes that happened with my money started at the very beginning of the year actually and that's Us increasing the amount of money that we pay ourselves out every month us of course is myself and Dennis so we pay ourselves out our money goes into the business right and we pay ourselves out a set salary so we went from making $236 a month at the beginning of the year to $3,050 a month just a few months into the year which was really great it gave me more breeding room in my budget which I definitely needed now from an investing perspective my plan especially because we hadn't increased that salary at the beginning of the year we're still just at that 2,000 even which was already tight just from an expenses perspective forget about trying to invest or save anything from that number specifically so my plan at the beginning of the year was to transfer $11,000 a month from my high interest savings account to my invest account now basically that wasn't going to change my net worth at all right that was literally just transferring money from one account to another but by doing that instead of just lumpsum investing at the beginning of the year I was keeping up the habit of monthly investing I was also dollar cost averaging into my investment account so that was my plan the good news is that by increasing our salary I think it was March that we started having the higher $3,050 number I was able to also invest an additional $1,000 some months so by the end of the year I ended up investing $199,000 and all of that went into my well simple invest tfsa and basically to explain the well simple invest part a little bit more I've been using a robo advisor and that's been doing my investing for me for the past few years so when you invest you have a lot of different options actually but at a super high level you can either pay another person a physical person to do your investing for you you could do your investing yourself or you could have a computer or a robo advisor do it now I've been choosing to do it the robo advisor route for the last few years and then I specifically use the tfsa investment account so that's what I did from a monthly perspective but we also paid our SES out a bonus at the end of the year so how it works for us based on how much actual money we make how much business Revenue we have we kind of look into all of it in December and see how much we can afford to pay ourselves out in addition to that monthly salary this year we went with $20,000 so for me when I take that $20,000 into account I'm going to ended up investing $31,000 for the year and then saving $88,000 so that's what happened this year with my investments and savings now I want to start to cover what's changing for next year so the first big thing is that we're actually changing our monthly salaries again we're increasing them and bumping them up even more in the new year now like I just said around that conversation we have around how much we can pay ourselves out in a bonus we always have that big conversation about how our business did for the last year all of that around December and a part of that conversation is seeing if we can if we want to increase our salaries for the new year as well now everyone's going to have a different business strategy from a financial perspective so there's tons of different ways you can go about this increasing your salary paying ourselves out a salary all of that but for us at a high level we know that we do still want to invest in real estate someday something that's important for that is showing that our income is increasing and at a healthy amount too so that's a big reason why we want to pay it out but another one also is it allows us to continue to invest as well so that's kind of a little bonus there too so the amount that we're starting to pay ourselves out as of January so we're done with the $3,050 a month number instead now we're paying ourselves out $ 4,459 191 per month now what that means is that I'll actually have enough room in my new month monthly salary now to invest just for my salary and stop switching money from my savings or transferring money from my savings to my investing account every month I'm actually really excited about this because I've been doing that I guess since we've been self-employed to keep myself investing but again the numbers don't actually change every month right I'm just switching it from saving to investing I guess sometimes it goes up or down a little bit but you know what I mean so it's actually going to be really nice to just have my $2,000 a month that's what I'm aiming for at least going directly from that $445 salary into my investing account then I'll be able to pay my expenses from the other $2,459 191 that's left over and then my plan from there is just if I don't spend all of that every month I'll save the rest I will say though I did like a money wrapped video this year hopefully you guys have seen it if not we'll link it somewhere for you guys to check it out it was pretty fun but I looked at what my monthly spending was like on average so some months are higher some are lower for this past year in 2023 and my monthly spending average was $2,900 a month which is already higher than the 24 400 I'll have left so we'll see I'll have to like bring it down a little bit there are categories that I can totally cut that are excess anyway so this new salary should give me the room to invest 2,000 a month and still spend more than I had budgeted last year so I so so I should be more than okay in that department but that's the plan from an income spending and investing per month situation next year I also want to really quickly touch on like the emotional part of money from this perspective and seeing my numbers start to kind of grow again for us and I don't know if anyone can relate to this it's a little bit different if your like salar is continuously going up like it might be if you're staying on the same career path but for us when we jumped into being self-employed we were on that steady path of you know your salary slowly going up therefore how much you save and invest can go up it's just on a consistent path and then we had to take a pay cut in that first year and then like I said throughout the year my investments were just coming from my savings so my numbers weren't really changing that much and we're finally back to a point that feels similar to where we were before we' quit our jobs were self-employed now again I always have to remember in the back of my mind that my personal income my personal savings and Investments is different cuz we still have a business account that is ours as well so I know that that's there but it definitely still it's kind of like an emotional roller coaster as you go through the ups and the Downs so it does feel really nice to feel like salar is at a good point again and I'm going to be able to invest a healthy amount every single month now another really big change that I'm making in 20124 is to my investment strategy I'm actually no longer going to be using a well simple invest or robo advisor at all and instead I'm going to be doing a self-directed approach investing by myself using well simple trade instead if you guys have been following along the channel at all this is a really big change for me I've been using well simpol invest since January 2021 so pretty much exactly 3 years ago it's been a really long time and that was a big deal for me to actually start investing even using a robo advisor I've kind of tracked the emotional journey of changing up my investing strategy over time but it's been pretty similar other than tweaks here and there over the last 3 years so this is a big change I actually still liked using the robo advisor it makes things easy I'll talk a little bit more about this in a second but the biggest reason why I'm making the switch or at least what spurred me to make the switch now is the fact that as the amount of money I had in my account grew as I invested more the amount of money I was paying in fees became higher now the fee for well simple invest specifically is only .5% which is still a lot lower than the 1 to 2% average that it would cost if you had a real life human doing your like fund manager doing your investing for you so it's still much cheaper from that perspective but as someone who's really been growing in my confidence and feel like I'm more capable in my investing journey I do want to highlight before I keep going that technically doesn't even take a lot of confidence and ability we'll do more videos and talk about that a little bit more in the future but I did realize that I could still save hundreds of dollars a year if not thousands of dollars a year eventually as my account continue to grow in its value by doing it in a self-directed way and just investing for myself so now as good as time as any to actually make that switch I do want to say we're going to be doing at least two more videos in depth about this topic so one covering my portfolio results after three years of using the robo advisor first so before making the switch seeing where my account was at at the threee Mark which is pretty exciting we've been documenting the last few years as well and then also one all about like the actual transfer of changing your well simple invest account into a well simple trade account especially when I had my tfsa I just transferred from one tfsa to another so stay tuned for those in the New Year's we'll get like New Year's New Year and we'll get really into depth and detail on those two topics so the other decision I made with making this switch is that I could have in theory just bought the exact same ETFs that well simple invest the robo advisor was buying for me now on my own with Wells simple trade instead of doing that I'm keeping it simple I'm going for a One Fund solution I'll be investing in xqt instead that's the only fund I'll be investing in it's the same one Dennis has we have a video on this on the channel already as well and I'll be doing that on a monthly basis now before getting into that I first have to transfer and reinvest that $50,000 that was in my account when I left while simple invest I think for now my plan is to do $10,000 a month over like a 6month period so it's $50,000 plus the $112,000 I'm investing for our bonus this year and then I'll still be doing 2,000 a month in 2024 so once all that money is reinvested then I'll just be going on a consistent $2,000 a month basis I hope that makes sense to you guys hopefully it's not too confusing but at a high level the main summary is that I'm switching from well simple invest to well simple trade I'm investing on my own into xqt every single month within my tfsa also because to end off this year I'm max out my tfsa account which is very exciting I'll have to ReMax it out again in the New Year cuz your contribution room grows every single year so I'll do that first but at some point next year I'm going to have to open up a new investment account um potentially an fhsa we'll get a little bit more into that in some videos next year so stay tuned but just know that in the New Year another change to my investing strategy will be which account I open up next so we'll talk more about that this year okay so the last thing I'm going to talk about is my budget categories budget overview for 2024 so I'm going to pull it up I got my laptop here and walk you guys through it so the first tab is my like standard monthly budget this is what if every single month was the same of course it's not but if it was what is going to be my goal for the main categories so rent is at 9.50 this time last year it was $925 it got raised the middle of the last year so now we're paying at $950 a month internet hopefully is going to stay the same we might have to renegotiate again but if it stays the same at about $62 a month my portion is $31 a month utilities like our Hydra goes anywhere between $225 and $30 so I just Budget on the high end at 30 groceries I'm upping a little bit last year I had 250 a month as my goal we ended up hitting we're over that and under that depending on the month but we ended up hitting an average of like $282 to $300 I think I'm going to make my budget 300 because that way I'm not allocating the money to other places to overspend so it's on the high end but we'll see how that goes so groceries $300 restaurants 150 this is going to be my craziest category to try to focus on for the year I don't know if you guys saw but I spent like $5,000 on eating out last year so that's my biggest personal goal to bring that down we'll probably do some challenges and stuff throughout the year let me know what you want to see and how I can creatively bring that down coffee shops I'm keeping at $50 I'm pretty good at that it's something I like to have in my budget public transportation I actually ended up refilling my like Presto card it's called it's public transportation card about every other month so I'm just going to actually budget $50 per month even though really it'll be either zero or or 100 depending on the month taxi services I do spend in that category sometimes but not enough to budget for it so that's at zero still getting a massage every single month $146.6 personal care I'm keeping at $100 a month it's kind of hard cuz sometimes I go over but I do feel like that one helps me try to keep it down by keeping it a low amount so I'll keep that one there and the only other category that I'm actually budgeting something specific for is subscriptions $12.42 a month that's for Spotify specifically now other I am throwing some money in here and the reason it's very specific at $339.90 is because I just took the average I think I spent $4,000 is in the other category last year so divided that by 12 that's about what that is at so at least that way every single month right it's going to be higher than that some months and much lower other months but that kind of gives me my monthly budget so my monthly expenses total if I stick to this would be $259.99 you also see on here that I have my monthly income total this is that new number I said we're paying ourselves out this year and what it will add up to on an annual level of that I'm also trying to invest that 2,000 a month and so then this $300 number that's all the expenses that I have budgeted for and the investing portion that's what I'd have left over from my income so if I'm able to have something left over in the budget then I could save like $35 $3600 this year on top of that but we'll see I'll probably end up spending that amount you'll see below it I also wanted to input there we go on my big expenses alone I could potentially spend that amount I guess that's kind of a nice way to do it if I save a little bit every month I can cover these big expenses but dentist appointment I go twice a year Christmas gifts is a big one once a year and then getting my haircut this is including getting it dyed that's why it's such a high number but these are all things I can't really budget for on a monthly basis but I know are going to be coming up this year so I want to have them on my radar as well now that's it for like the standard budget categories but I do want to show you guys that we used the same budget spreadsheet all last year it worked really well for us tracking all of our transactions and expenses it really helps me with what I want to cut down on this year or what I didn't mind spending on so I'll show you right now a little bit of the changes that we made for this year the first one is I now have a bank accounts tab I like to do this it's kind of a little bit manual if you don't want to you could just not but at the beginning of the month I just actually kind of give a point in time snapshot of where all my accounts are sitting at cuz obviously they're always changing but at the beginning of January 2024 so where we're at right now this is exactly how much is in my checking account my two savings account and also now my investment account so we can see if I keep filling this out February March April we can see how the numbers are shifting obviously the checking account because it's a hub right it depends on if I've been paid when I write this down or not it's going to change but I'm really curious to see how my investments go up and down and also how much I have saved by tracking it in this way now the most important tab in the spreadsheet in my opinion is the monthly expense tracker this is the like manual part of the budget that I think gets me to actually stick to my categories really be aware of what's going on with my budget and be able to make changes every single month as I go throughout the year so how I do this is for me personally you could do this on a monthly like basis like set up a day for yourself for me I kind of try and keep it going as I can throughout the month spend a few minutes here and there every week you put in the date so let's say like I went grocery shopping on January 1st which maybe I will January 1st groceries I'll say that I went to Metro specifically and exactly how much it cost me I almost put $1,000 $100 and then that'll be how I track everything throughout the month and then over here you can see how you actually did against your budget like your actuals versus your budgeted amount and rate yourself if you did okay or not so that's what this is at and then I also have my annual budget tab as well so everything from the monthly expense tracker will feed into here so I can see on an annual basis how my budget's going for all these different categories I really really loved tracking my budget this way over the past year it's been really awesome planning on doing it again next year like I said and we're also planning on actually making this budget template available for you guys as well so stay tuned for that it's going to be coming really soon we want to hear in the comments though if you guys are excited about it if you'd be interested in it we know we got a lot of comments asking about this and how we track it last year so that's everything for my budget category and this template so that's it for my money strategy and plans for next year I really want to hear from you guys what are you planning on doing are you changing up your budget your investment strategy how did this past year go for you let me know all of that in the comments below we also have a lot of really exciting videos all about this type of topic Investments all of that coming up soon we're really excited for those videos and until then happy New Year and we'll see you soon

Channel: Steph & Den

Views: 29,130

Keywords: Steph & Den, How I'm Able To Save 52% Of My Income In 2024, My New Savings Goal & Investment Strategy, Reset For 2024, Financial Reset 2024, 2024 Financial Goals, My Money Goals, How I'll Save 50% Of My Income In 2024, Resetting My Finances, Save 50% Of My Income In 2024, How I'll Save 50% Of My Income, How To Save Money, How To Save Money In 1 Year, How To Write A Financial Plan, How To Budget In 2024, How To Plan Your Personal Finances, How To Set Up A Budget 2024

Id: tJVwwbLTHX0

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2023