We have been trucking along in our road to financial stability for months now.  Money management has always been a struggle for us.  I’ve been doing tons of research and listening to oodles of podcasts on money smarts the past few months though.  One thing is clear – there is no quick and easy way out of debt and into financial stability.  We have been sloooooowly transforming our lives.  We decided to move out into the middle of nowhere.  What better way to break your fast food habits am I right?! The closest Tim Hortons (for all you fellow Canadians) is 45 minutes away.  Unfortunately, I still work in the city so the eating out tendencies haven’t died but they’ve drastically reduced.

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Unfortunately our living expenses seem to have gone up so we are working hard on reducing those but there isn’t much wiggle room.  Our rent went down by almost $200 which is great but since I now have an hour commute to work it’s largely eaten up by the increased gas consumption.  Internet in the middle of nowhere is hard to come by though.  And we need it because hubby is doing online schooling and I often work from home and connect remotely.  So our internet costs have gone up quite a bit because we used to pay $80 for unlimited and after exhausting all internet options the only one that suits us is a portable internet hub.  This ranges from $60-145/month based on usage and we only get $100gb which we easily and pathetically go over.

Hydro has also been a bit of a doozy.  We have done really good reducing our usage.  And the whole first month I was so excited monitoring how low our usage and electricity costs were.  And then the first bill arrived.  Hydro One (who we weren’t with before and have no options BUT to be with them) charges delivery fees at about 90% of your electricity costs.  There also is no natural gas in this area so propane or wood burning are our only options, both of which are pricey.  We finally decided to go with wood since we don’t need hydro to run our wood stove.

I think in the long run especially without theI like to include my personal road to recovery from financial disaster so you can see that I’m struggling too!  I’ve been living paycheque to paycheque for far too long too!  We can turn it around together! fast food the move has saved us money, but man oh man that internet bill is a painful one!