A Frugal New Canadian is your gateway to understanding the art of frugal living. But not at the cost of financial prosperity! We believe that frugality isn’t about deprivation but rather a strategic pathway to realizing your dreams and building lasting wealth.

My journey in Canada began in 2014 when I relocated to Halifax, Nova Scotia from India. I restarted my life as a student with limited resources at the age of 27.Living frugally comes naturally to me because of my upbringing in a developing nation with limited means to end. Every cent had a purpose. This is why I was able to keep my costs down as a student and now, as a mid-aged professional. Our blog focuses on key financial concepts that we have picked up in our Savings/investing journey. We also share tips and tricks on Frugal Living. Unfortunately, the cost of living is ever-increasing in Canada. And one of the methods of tackling this is to live within one’s means and being mindful re frugal.

Our goal is to build a library of resources that Canadians and especially New immigrants can use to enhance their own personal finance journeys. We choose to be anonymous to be able to share our Financials

Our FI portfolio grew by $6K over the last month mostly due to new ETF purchases. I am relatively unhappy in my role but find it difficult to get a new job even at a lower pay if required. We are also expecting mid-next year which means that we're going to be a single income household pretty soon. I am just hoping that I can find something that I can thrive in for the next couple of years. A slight increase of $11 over the dividends received last October. Most of our gains are realized in the last month of the quarter. Slowly and steadily. At this point, I am looking for ways to keep motivated in our quest for Financial Independence. I guess one way to look at this is to see where we are relative to being a million dollar household. It turns out that we're more than halfway there if we included our Home Equity. We mostly track our Net worth in FI i.e. invested amounts within Canadian brokerages on this page. Mrs. Frugal New Canadian got her annual bonus in September which boosted our Savings rate to 54% for the month. We were able to save and invest upwards of 40% of our post-tax (+ retirement match) income. Without the bonus boost, we'd have a SR of about 15% for the month. Growth of $21K month over month. This is driven by Mrs. Frugal New Canadian's annual bonus payment. If we exclude the bonus payout, we still saw an increase of over $7K month over month. We purchased a couple of grand worth of ETFs. The FI includes our company-matched RSP amounts too. Note that some dividend payments happened in the first week of October. But we like to keep the comparison to the previous year consistent, so we will bring those payments into September. We realized that carrying a new home Sinking Fund is kind of similar to paying up your mortgage. After all we intend to sell our primary residence when the time comes and purchase another property against it. No pre-payments made since the last few months but given that we are up for a mortgage renewal soon, we maybe making a couple of large payments soon. $1,500 added in July. We've relabeled this fund to the "Everything Sinking Fund" given that I almost had a melt-down in August regarding my 9-5. We'll build up on the Cash reserves still. Maybe this serves as a much needed break amount or maybe as a New Home Fund. Nonetheless, the goal is to get about a $100K in the Everything Sinking Fund in the next couple of years. We managed to keep above the 25% benchmark for the month of July.

Recent Blogs