savings

Unlike some of my friends, I’m not a regular Costco shopper. I find the sheer size of the place overwhelming — you can’t quickly stop in on the way home from work to pick up milk. You also have to buy a membership, at $55. The other major drawback to Costco for me is that every time I go in, I’m hit by an inexplicable urge to buy large quantities of things I don’t really need — like a massive box of meatballs that won’t fit in my freezer or a huge store-sized package of Swedish berries.

Whenever we talk about trimming back our budgets we end up targeting stuff like coffee, lunches out and cable television. We’ve cast these as wasteful, pointless things that simply bring us pleasure but no long-term payback.

I had lunch with a friend a couple of weeks ago — a young professional with a growing family and a wife who looks after their kids full time. He was telling me about his father-in-law, who recently retired after taking some heavy losses on his RRSP during the financial crisis. He’s got no company pension plan, no life insurance and reduced CPP and OAS because he’s always been self-employed.

Some sobering news from a new TD Canada Trust survey — 30 percent of Canadians say they don’t have enough money to cover their living expenses (as in basics like rent and food).

At about the same time my husband and I decided to make it a priority to pay off our mortgage, we started talking about retirement. When did we want to retire, and how much would we need?