Hooray! You are in a family and it’s time to sort out your household. Each family has its set income and configuration based on the number of adults and children within it. Your first task as a family is to figure out your family budget based on the salary(ies) of the earners in your household. All students have been assigned a “Family” to be working with. This is on File 3 - “Families.” This is not a group project, so you will see your name with other students, you have just been assigned the information given for that pretend family. The assignment is considered to be individual, but that doesn’t mean you can’t help and learn from each other.

Using the budget guidelines below create a monthly budget for your family. You have got to get to the end of the month, before you get to the end of the money!

This assignment has multiple files to look at. File 1, is this instruction file. File 2 is the Data sheet containing the information for taxes and other deductions. File 3 is the list of families, their jobs and wages (you will find which family you are assigned to on there). File 4 is the two Pay stubs (one for each job) you will type information into.

The idea is that you must determine how much money you earn from the jobs your family has combined once taxes and other deductions are taken off. We have set this up to be as close to actual real life as possible. This means that you will be using real job wages, salaries, pay check stubs and all the categories you would see in real life when you get paid. Then real life managing of money to budget for the things you need to pay for when living trying to support a family.

Part A: Pay Stub
So far it sounds easy, right? Not so fast turbo! There are a series of deductions that you must remove from your overall salary (gross salary) before you have the money left to work with each month (net salary).
Use the information on the File 2 Data Sheet material to help you with your deductions and fill in File 4 PAY STUB for each job in your family. Gross Salary is the money you get paid from working before anything is removed. Net Salary is what you have left after all the taxes and other deductions are removed.

You will need to address:
Federal Income Taxes - money taken off your gross pay based on how much you earn
Alberta Income Taxes - money taken off your gross pay based on how much you earn
Employment Insurance - money taken off your gross pay that you can access if you lose your job and are out of work.
Canadian Pension Plan Deductions - money taken off your gross pay

Things to Consider (think about) when calculating each deduction:
Your taxes are calculated based on different ranges of money. Once you have passed the maximum for a range, that money does not get taxed again. This is a bit complicated, but I will put a video up to help explain it.
All deductions come off the gross salary. Always use the gross salary when calculating each deduction.

Part B: Family Budget You will find this on file 4 to the right of the pay stubs - you need to scroll over to see it.
Now that you know how much money you have to work with, use the budget outline in the File 4 Pay Stub/Budget Google Sheet to determine how much money you will put in each category represented in the Budget Outline below. Consider that you currently have no Debt Payments (luck you!) and Charitable Giving is optional.
Things to Consider (think about) when making the choices:
You do not need to use the maximum amount of money for each category. (In fact you can’t as that would be 136% of your salary!)
You cannot spend more than you have; the total sum from all categories should equal your net salary.
You cannot have any money ‘left over’, all of your money should be in a category.

Budget Outline
Determine what percentage of your overall spending each category will have. You should not spend more than the maximum percentage in the range nor should you spend less than the minimum percentage in the range.
Housing (rent, mortgage): 15 - 25 %
Utilities (heat, water, phone, cellphone, television, internet etc.): 5 – 10%
Transportation (public transportation or fuel and maintenance): 10 – 15%
Healthcare (prescriptions, dentist, chiropractor etc.): 5 – 10%
Food : 5 – 15%
Investments/Savings (retirement and future): 5 – 10%
Entertainment/Recreation (movies, trips, gym memberships): 5 – 9%
Miscellaneous Personal (grooming, clothing etc.): 2– 7%
Debt Payments (no debt right now) : 5 – 10%
Charitable Giving (optional) : 5 – 15%

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