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. That’s a decent salary by any Canadian standard. I had a stable job, no debt spiral, 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’s $2,160 a year I genuinely did not see coming. Not because I was being reckless — because I was never tracking it. Every $15 lunch felt small in isolation. Together they were silently 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 were paying for themselves every single month without a single notification. Gym membership I stopped using. App I downloaded once in 2022. Streaming service I shared with someone who moved out. $140 a month. $1,080 a year. Gone.

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. Just in amounts small enough to feel invisible. $30 here. $45 there. A thing I needed, then a thing I wanted, then a thing I barely thought about. Over $200 every single month without fail.

The Total

Add it up.

$2,160 on eating out above what I thought. $1,080 on subscriptions I forgot about. $2,400 on impulse spending I denied.

That’s over $3,000 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. It’s not a willpower problem. It’s a visibility problem.

Banks don’t show you this. They show you transactions, not patterns. They show you numbers, not the truth about your habits.

What I Did About It

I built Pilot Wealth.

It connects to your bank through Plaid, pulls every transaction automatically, and shows you exactly where your money goes — by category, by month, by habit. No manual entry. No spreadsheets. No guessing.

You find out your real numbers in about two minutes.

It’s free to use at pilotwealth.ca.

If you’re making decent money and still feeling broke at the end of every month, the problem almost certainly isn’t your income. It’s the gap between what you think you spend and what you actually spend.

Close that gap and everything changes.

Pilot Wealth is a free Canadian personal finance app built for people under 40. Track your spending, savings goals, and registered accounts automatically at pilotwealth.ca