Payday |

Let's budget my last paycheck of 2025. If you've been here a while, you know I usually do a voice over with my little spreadsheet, but I wanted to try something a bit different today. So my bi weekly gross pay is five thousand six hundred and thirty two dollars and four cents. An automatic contribution of one hundred and sixty six dollars and ninety six cents comes out to my RRSP, which my employer matches. Employee matching programmes are literally just free money, so always check if you have this and max it out if you do. Then after taxes and deductions, I'm left with four thousand and ninety dollars and seventy six cents. I'm in tech. So a significant portion of my pay comes from stock, but my stock has already been paid out for the year. So this is just budgeting my base salary. Let's start with automatic contributions. First, my bi weekly mortgage payment comes out of 1400 dollars and also an auto contribution of two hundred dollars to my portfolio. With a private wealth, I keep this low for a reason. And finally $60 to my dog's emergency fund. My partner and I both contribute $120 in total. I save part of every paycheck to pay my credit card in full at the end of every month. I pay for literally everything on my credit card. So you'll never see me using a debit card or cash unless I absolutely have to. Surprisingly, my spending in December wasn't feral like it usually is. So I'm putting aside 1200 dollars for that. Then I have one thousand two hundred and thirty dollars and seventy six cents to play with. I use zero base budgeting, which means that every dollar has a purpose. I'm gonna invest another $600 with my own managed portfolio with ball simple. I like to control where I allocate my money each month, which is why my auto contribution wasn't higher. This just works better for me. But as always, the most important thing is that every dollar has a purpose.