Friday, August 3, 2012

Expenses of moving

I thought it would be interesting to see what we've had to pay since we bought and moved into the house, so here's the breakdown:

Actual moving expenses:

$50 - Sublet apartment. This is an administrative fee that the building management charges.
$114.45 - Shampoo the carpet in the apartment, including a pet deodorizer.
$90.12 - U-Haul rental.
$28.63 - Slurpee run for our friends/family who helped us move.
$0 - Food for our movers. My lovely in-laws hosted a dinner for the movers and put us up for the night.

Sub-total: $283.20


Regular, but new to us, bills
$534.66 - Mortgage payment - first one!
$325 - Property taxes. We'll be on a regular monthly payment as of September, but I wanted to bring that monthly amount down, so we did a one-time payment to drop the overall amount owing.
$139.16 - Home insurance. First payment is a double one, but it's normally $70.
$38.33 - Mortgage insurance. We decided to cancel this after the first month as we increased Husband's life insurance through my work and he's going on his work's plan too.

Sub-total: $1046.15



Home updates:
$90.39 - Home Depot and Rona purchases (various home repair stuff - wood, cement, spray foam insulation, wood screws, etc.)
$100 - This went into a TFSA for our home repairs fund - so not yet spent, but I'm treating it like it has.

Sub-total: $190.39


Necessary or not so necessary home stuff:

$75 - Lawn mower and weed eater (got off Kijiji for cheap)
$10 - Shovels. A bit early I know, but two shovels for $10 on Kijiji was hard to pass up.
$0 - Garden hoses. Free from a woman on freecycle!
$11.54 - iPod arm band. I am now walking to work for more than 2 minutes, so I wanted an arm band to easily carry my iPod. Because of this we're saving $60 a month for a bus pass.
$26.97 - An area rug for the living room, a clothes drying rack, a new water bottle and cutting boards. The actual bill was nearly $300, but we had gift cards.

Sub-total: $123.51


Unforeseen expenses:

$166.40 - New box spring. The one piece we had wouldn't fit up the stairs, so we had to buy a new split box spring. Luckily I sold the old one for $80, as the new box spring actually cost $246.40.

TOTAL: $1,809.65


Thoughts on spending: 
It's actually not as bad as I thought it would be. It's only $763.50 if you take out the regular bills (those were put into our monthly budget and replace our rent and down payment savings).

But this doesn't include the lawyer's fees or any actual costs of buying the house like land transfer fees, title insurance, etc. It also doesn't include our new bedroom furniture, which we would have bought regardless of moving, but that was another couple grand.

On the positive end, we did get our $500 or so damage deposit back from the apartment, plus we're waiting on our $50 deposit from the parkade that we used when living downtown.

A few weeks ago I probably would have cursed the house and wished that we had never moved, but now I'm settling in and feeling more relaxed, so I'm okay with the money we have spent. Hopefully this will now taper off and we can stick to our regular budget.

Have a great weekend everyone! Long weekend here in Canada! :)

2 comments:

  1. Don't you love all the new expenses that come with buying a house? I think that was one of the most stressful times of my life: I felt like I was bleeding money.

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    1. That's exactly how I've described it too! Just when I think we're done spending or that we have nothing left to spend, something else comes up! I'm hoping it ends soon enough.

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