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I wish we had that much left after everything. We live in an apartment and our bills run us about $1500 a month. It'll be brought down once I get my one loan paid off in about 6 months. I'm excited. Hah. But we usually have between $100-$200 left over. I'm excited just to have that. :(
ETA: FI is unemployed, but just started his plumbing business so we should have more money once that starts to pick up.
Hmmm... I'm not sure howmuch we have left over at the end of the month, but I will say this: bi weekly when FI gets paid we put $1000 in savings. The opposite weeks when I get paid we put $250 in savings. Whatever is left in our account pays bills, mortgage, etc. We usually have between $2000-$3000 in cheqing. It is soo much easier to have a low mortgage. We were approved for almost $600,000 house, and instead bought one for $297,000 and are able to enjoy life and not be house poor.
Good luck!
That's really only a question you can answer for youself. I'm at my comfort level with at least 1k left over after all the bills too. Ideal would be 2-3k.
totally depends what is in your budget and what works for you. Are you budgeting for vacations? xmas presents? total retirement savings, emergency funds, house renovations/fixes etc? If so than that 1K is more than good enough.
@FutureMsVW: Wow. 240,000 is what we're looking at and that's stretching our budget. We make about $100,000 between the two of us and we'd like to up our savings,since right now we only put about $400-$600 into savings/ rrsps a month.
I just feel nervous about having less than $1000AT&T the end of each month. Fortunately we'll have the car paid off with our tax return, andloan student loan paid off by Christmas, but that just would go toward our bigger mortgage. Our mortgage ( if we get a good rate) will go fromabout $650 to just under $1000/ month
My FI and I don't have a fixed income so I can't budget as cleanly as I want to. Instead of going by what I've put into the bank each month, I go by what's already in there, which has been changing due to a lot of recent expenses attacking us at once - car purchase/loan, wedding, repairs, etc.
It used to be that as long as my checking account had at least $5000 at all times and my savings was growing, I was fine. Now we're trying to build up that $5000+ again and our savings tooka $3000 hit. Until March, a good bank account for us will be just "Do we have enough money to pay all these bills and still have $100+ left over?" After March we should be a lot more steady but February is going to hit us hard.
I feel poor right now.
I think putting anything in savings is great.. we are going a little bit hard core right now, but we won't always do that! I think putting away $400-600 is really good, and still having $1000 left over is good I think. if there is trouble you could always dip into your savings!
@anotherbee: the question is, what is that "leftover" money supposed to be fore. If you have accounted for all savings, mortgage and contingencies you dont need money "left over"
Ugh....multi posts...iPad not working well.
You ladies are making me feel better. The "left over " would go into savings as well and we would use for trips, emergency funds, extra retirement. We're loohing at building, so we won't need to worry about house fixes/ rents, butwould like new furniture for dining room/man cave/kids rooms. That would also be the extra money
@harleyq: Omg me too! We just dropped about $3000 on the jeep( that. We're still paying for) so we had a bad month. I've told DH that from now on, I want $800 in cash in our bank account at the end of month to show us that we can afford that new house comfortably, and get in the habit of spending less money. Plus $800 for almost a year will give us a little extra for a down payment!
@anotherbee we built our house too, and so far we have spent nothing fixing it up or had any issues (knock on woood!)
nice knowing that liekly we won't have to replace or fix anything for quite a while!
Wow. I guess things are a lot cheaper here and we make a lot less.
Lol oh lordy. Broke ass over here! But no...out of my check I may have 100-200 after bills and that's on a good week. Hahaha my SO on the other hand will have 1000-2000 leftover from his check. I make a lot less than him obviously and we don't combine our moneyys.
You will probably never feel like you have enough money ;)
As long as your living within you means, and have some savings in the works, you are in fabulous shape! Most people live paycheck to paycheck. Work towards your goals, but make sure you enjoy life too! Its too short and not guaranteed!
We have already bought and paid off a house, and live off of rental income at the moment so we live with not alot to spare, but we also happily make sacrifices ( one car, budget wedding, no honey moon, frugal spending habits etc) to be a stay at home couple ;) It won't be forever, but soon we will have another income source so more savings and $ left over will be available.
@anotherbee do you live in Canada?
We pay approx:
Mortgage: 567 biweekly
Property Tax account: 150 biweekly
Cable/internet/phone: $160/month
Power: 40-60/month
Gas: under 100/month.. as low as 20/month in the summer
cell phones: 100/month
insurance: two cars and house: just under 300/month
cars: FI trick: 263/biweekly mine: 213/month (almost done paying off)
water: 150ish every 3 months
Gym memberships: 75/month
we have a new "energy star" house, so it reallllly helps keep all our utility bills down.
hmmm im not sure if i am forgetting anything!! but that is a pretty good break down of most things i think.. then like i said total of $1250 biweekly into savings, that gets broken up into RRSPs/emergency fund, etc.
ETA: Plsu gas, grociers, etc that varies!
We should have between $1000 - $1200 left over every month if we keep within budget. That is also after paying us each an allowance and putting $1500 in savings. Like you, we somehow end up with less than that due to other random expenses.
If you aren't already adding into a cash savings, then I think you should start there. You must pay yourselves first and then budget around that. I imagine once we move and have a larger mortgage we'll really need to tighten up and lay off of traveling, going out so much to continue to save at the rate we want and pay the mortgage.
On bills inlcude rent, car insurance, car payment, truck insurance, gas, groceries, electirc, tv & phone/internet. After that our left over money goes towards eating out, date nights, movies & whatever "wants" we want to buy our selves or each other. So that being left over money plus what we don't spend we have $800-$1000 left over after paying all bills for one month on average.
It doesn't seem like we spend that much on wants/eating out a month but I guess we do! 
I have it set up that x amount of my check goes into our bills account and the rest goes into our savings. So my budget is very set within our bills account, we have nothing left t the end of the month but our savings is awesome :)
I have about $400 left over at the end of every month and my Fi usually has about $3500 left over every month (he has a great job!) I wish I had a bit more, but after the next year it'll balance out when I reduce my pension contributions since I'm putting in so much to start.
@FutureMsVW: wow! How is your power bill so low?! I guess you have gas for appliances, etc? We're dependent on electricity for all that, except we'll be getting a heat pump. i'm estimating $225 (equalized billing) for our power bill for the new house.
And I'm also already jealous of your mortgage! Our's will be almost the same bi weekly for $50,000 less in house! If I can get the rate right now of 3.1%, then we're looking at around $490 biweekly.
Thanks for all the responses ladies. You've definately made me feel better about the whole situation. Now i'm really hoping we can cut out all the spending that eats up our $$$ so I can pump more into our RRSPs!
We haven't gone through a full month paying our mortgage and bills for the new place yet (January was 1/2 and 1/2 between our new place and old place) but we should have at about $2K left over as long as there were no outlier purchases like a plane ticket or a repair bill or something. So to be conservative we can count on socking away at least $1K per month extra without trying too hard, which I think is great!
I would have 'downsized' on house if I didn't live in NYC, lol!
@anotherbee: In determining how much you should have "left over" (by which I assume short-term savings money, not long-term or mid-range savings like retirement, CDs and stock market), it really depends upon your bills, rather than your income.
This is my general recommendations on savings strategies:
Obviously if you can save more than this, even better! Good luck!
Thanks so much ladies. I feel confident about taking on a bigger mortgage now!
@anotherbee: we definitely don't have that much left at the end of every month and we don't feel broke nor do we feel house poor. we are happy and healthy and do what we can... we can't afford to go to hawaii every year but we have a beautiful house, nice cars, and nice stuff for our baby.
I put about $1500 per month in savings each month and after expenses, I usually have between 1000 to 1300 in my checking account at all times.
We just went through this excercise while house hunting to figure out what our most realistic budget was going to be. We annualized all of our expenses (mortgage, gas, food, retirement, house repairs, etc.) and incomes (including bonuses and taxes) to determine how much money would be left each month (on average). We are in the process of buying a home and it came out to around $3500/month of savings assuming that I am still employed full-time. Once we have the baby this summer and I (hopefully) transfer my job to PT, then it will be around $1000/month. Knowing those numbers made us much more comfortable with the size house that we were able to buy.
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Hi bees, DH and I are looking at buying a house. In budgeting, it looks like after all our bills, we'll have between $1000 and $1500 at the end of the month. I say that, but we never seem to have much left over because of the wedding, a car breaking, or extra trips to the grocery store, etc.
My question is: howmuch should you have left over at the end of the month to feel comfortable with still being able to live? I feel like anything less that $1000 is scary and we'd be house poor. My budget includes RRSPcontributions, personal spending money, and about $40 a week for date night.