I Was Earning $80,000 and Living Paycheque to Paycheque. Here's Exactly Where My Money Was Going.
I thought I was good with money. I was making $80,000 a year, had a stable job, and had no obvious financial disaster. And yet every month, by the time my next paycheque hit, I had almost nothing left.
I didn't understand it. So I started actually looking.
The eating out problem
I told myself I spent around $200 a month on restaurants. Takeout here, a lunch there, nothing crazy.
It was $380.
That is an extra $180 a month compared with what I thought I was spending. Over a year, that is $2,160 I genuinely did not see coming. I was not being reckless, I was just never tracking it. Every $15 lunch felt small on its own, but together they were quietly eating my savings.
The subscription problem
I thought I had maybe five subscriptions. Netflix, Spotify, something else I couldn't name off the top of my head.
I had eleven.
The ones I forgot about charged me every month without a single notification. They included a gym membership I had stopped using, an app I downloaded once in 2022 and a streaming service I shared with someone who moved out. Together they cost about $140 a month, or $1,680 a year.
The impulse spending problem
This one I really didn't see coming. I genuinely believed my impulse spending was zero. I'm not a big shopper. I don't buy things I don't need.
Except I do, constantly, in amounts small enough to feel invisible. A $30 purchase here and a $45 one there, first something I needed, then something I wanted, then something I barely thought about. It came to over $200 every month.
The total
Add it up.
| Figure | What it means |
|---|---|
| $2,160 | extra eating out above what I thought |
| $1,680 | subscriptions I forgot about |
| $2,400+ | impulse spending I denied |
That is over $6,000 a year disappearing silently, on a salary I genuinely thought was enough.
Why this happens
Nobody tracks this stuff in real time. You guess at the start of the month, forget about it by week two, and wonder where it went by week four, which has less to do with willpower than with never actually seeing the numbers.
Banks don't show you this. They show you transactions, not patterns, so the truth about your habits stays hidden. That is why your bank balance can feel like it is lying to you: it shows what is in the account, not what is already spoken for.
What I did about it
I built Pilot Wealth.
It shows you exactly where your money goes by category, by month and by habit. It can connect to your bank through Plaid to pull every transaction in automatically, although automatic sync is temporarily paused while we finish some backend work, so entry is manual in the meantime.
You can see your real numbers in about two minutes.
If you're making decent money and still feeling broke at the end of every month, look at the gap between what you think you spend and what you actually spend before you look at your paycheque.
Close that gap and everything changes.
Pilot Wealth is a free Canadian personal finance app for seeing your real spending, savings goals and accounts in one place.
Open Pilot WealthCommon questions
Why do I feel broke on an $80,000 salary in Canada?
Several small, untracked costs do more damage than one big expense: eating out running higher than you'd guess, forgotten subscriptions, and impulse purchases small enough to feel invisible. Together they can quietly drain over $6,000 a year.
How much do forgotten subscriptions actually cost?
More than most people guess. A gym membership you stopped using, an app downloaded once years ago, or a streaming service you meant to cancel can add up to over $100 a month without a single notification telling you.
Is this a spending problem or a tracking problem?
Usually tracking. Most people don't overspend dramatically in any one category. The gap comes from never seeing the full pattern, so small, reasonable-looking purchases add up silently over a month.
Pilot Wealth is not a financial advisor. This article is for educational purposes only and is not financial, investment, tax, or legal advice.