Zero Money to Hero Money

I bit the bullet, and started up this personal finance blog as an extra motivator to get me to save money, and spend less.  I already do the budgets, the spreadsheets, the automatic withdrawls etc etc, but I still go way over my monthly alloted budget without realizing it.  I’m hoping that by setting goals and monitoring them through this blog I will pay closer attention to where I’m spending the money and hopefully achieve saving more than I normally would.  Every month I hope to set financial goals to reach for the next month, and track them through this blog.

A little bit about myself:  I’m 27 years old, and almost a first home owner who lives in Canada.  I work in high tech doing software development and photography / web design as a side job.  I’ve been working full time for a couple of years now and should have a lot more money saved than I do.  I did however make the very stupid mistake in university of spending way more than I made in my part time jobs and summer jobs.  Resulting in almost 25k worth of debt on credit cards and lines of credit by the time I graduated.  It took me nearly 2 years of full time work to pay it all off, and actually I’m not fully out of debt yet.

Currently I’m sitting at 10k paid to the company I’m buying my home from as a partial downpayment, an additional 9k in RRSP and I still owe $3500 on my line of credit.   On top of that I have a car loan that still has roughly 2 years left at $250 bi-weekly for my 2005 Mazda 3.  By September 15th my goal is to have 30k total for the downpayment on my condo (just over 15% of my mortgage value).  I’ve got some work to do.