Plus a short rant on Jordan Peterson as a bonus. You’re welcome.

This is my 4th post in a series on my personal finance journey. You can read blogs one, two, and three here…on my blog. Blogger-ing about personal finances is vulnerable. I’m constantly weighing how much is too much to expose, how ‘raw’ I should get, while keeping in mind the obvious—that i’m posting this on the internet. I was talking about this with a friend, who goes by Applesauce, and he said to just ‘expose it all’ and that as far as financial incompetency goes he’s seen a lot worse. He also said to ‘keep them entertained,’ and that I should stop talking about Jordan Peterson, which I have no intention of doing. Just so we’re all aware, Jordan’s most powerful life advice is to clean your room. Seriously, way to shoot for the moon, JP.

We’re all human, we all fuck-up and make bad choices. At the end of the day, there’s no point in crying over spilled milk or dwelling too heavily on the past. I was doing research while writing this post and discovered that one of the first people ever to ‘blog’ about personal finance was none other than Benjamin Franklin. Franklin had a yearly almanac that he published under the pseudonym “Poor Richard’s Almanack”. He gave bomb advice on how to be thrifty, and came up with famous adages like, “a penny saved is a penny earned,” and “beware of little expenses: a small leak will sink a great ship.”

My last two blogs (Dead Prezi’s pt. 1 and 2) are pretty well summed by Franklin’s phrase a small leak can sink a great ship. I’ve had some leaks in my day, and my figurative financial ship was never great to begin with. But the cool thing with blogging is that somehow sharing my financial leaks and blunders have inspired others to address their own. Like this message I got from a friend.

Messages like these are the fuel that keeps me going.

So, let’s keep going.

I said before I wanted to establish a plan for financial growth and figure out how to execute it. There’s so much that can go into building a personal financial plan. To start let’s keep things as simple as possible.

Here’s what I did (and you can too, if you want.)

Step one: Establish your target.

This will look different for everyone; but how do you determine what your target even is? Most likely you have some sense of where you’d like to be financially. For me, my goal is to move out at some point in my life, preferably sooner rather than later. Based on my identified goal I worked backwards to figure out roughly the amount I would need to make it happen.

Here’s the breakdown.

First I factored in my prospective fixed-costs.

For reference, this is based on the cost of living as a single person in Toronto. Rent, internet and utilities are all speculative based on current rates. Next I calculated my variables. Variables are your expenses that vary between months, unlike your rent and internet costs.

Okay — so I spent way too much on ‘entertainment’/going out in March, and I’m also getting rinsed by my auto insurance at $335.35/month. Between fixed and variable costs, the total came to $5,206.44/month. Figuring that out was boring, but not impossible or really even all that hard. $5,206.44 x 12 months (in a year) = $62,477.28

To make around $62,000 in a year, I’ll have to earn around $31.79/hour. Since I now know my financial target broken down by year, month, and hour, it’s a matter of figuring out how to get there. The next posts will be dedicated to the real game-plan for reaching my target — all facts, no gimmicks. I’ll wrap here. In the meantime, remember to clean your room, and thank you, as always, for reading.