Is minimum wage enough to get by in Canada? Enough for a family?

That would take an awful lot of discipline to keep that budget. You should start by carrying a small steno notebook with you where ever you go and write down each and every expense that you have for a few months, you'll see that you spend far more than you think you do. Also look up the total cost of ownership for your car on edmunds.com (it's only for the states but it gives you a good idea of what to budget for) and that will give you a reasonable figure to put aside for maintenance, insurance, registration etc. If you use public transit and just join a car sharing organization for the few times you need a car, you can save an awful lot by not having a car plus many CSO's have luxury cars like BMW's available to sign out for special events along with their fleet of smart cars and prius's

One of the advantages of keeping your income low is low taxes, Warren Buffet actually capped his salary at $50,000 and keeps the rest of his wealth in his company Berkshire Hathaway. Make sure you save up to buy a car instead of financing them, that saves a whole bunch and read a lot of finance books from the library, try to read one per month.

Your numbers pretty much assume that you can save everything that you make and you know that isn't the truth also your expenses appear to be dramatically under estimated. In Alberta, the minimum wage is $8.80 per hour so assuming a 20% income tax and a 10% tithe and using your numbers for expenses which I believe are understated by a large amount, you have a $67 per month surplus to invest (this would probably be eaten up by health insurance but let's neglect that for now). You can put up to $5,000 a year into a TFSA account which is completely tax free so that $67 per month would take up less than 1/5th of that allowance. If you open the right kind of TFSA, you can trade securities like stocks. The average per annum gain of the stock market over it's entire history has been 6% but it's reasonable to expect to be able to have yields as high as 15%, however using the 6% figure, you would have 0.4868% per month which means that over 7 years (84 months) you would have $67 * ( 1 - 1.004868^85 ) / ( 1 - 1.004868 ) which is $7,033.17 which is a far cry from your estimate of $116,480.00 even with the optimistic stock market returns of 15% per annum, you would have only $9,669.92 saved up after seven years. Note that this is without any extra spending money aside from your estimated $1,000 per year for "extra things". It doesn't even cover utilities, internet connection, clothes etc.

In Ontario, the minimum wage is $10.25 per hour so using your optimistic expense numbers, you would have a $243.67 per month surplus to invest and you might be able to save up to $25,578.68 in those 7 years at a 6% per annum investment yield, $35,168.18 at a 15% yield.

The good thing is that everything in the TFSA is tax free even when withdrawn and there's no limitations on withdrawals so that money will always be available and always be tax free.

It is possible to live quite well on minimum wage but it takes a lot of careful money management. Developing the money management skills is paramount regardless of how much you make and is what will determine whether or not you have a comfortable worry free life. There's a lot of people with six figure incomes that mismanaged their money.

If you do intend to try and make a go of it at minimum wage, you'll have to take advantage of every government assistance program that you can find, many of which are not publicized. Fortunately Canada has a lot of these.

Basically, it's easier said than done but it is possible. However your first step will be to learn how to do the math right cause you're clearly way off in your calculations.

Are your parents going to support you for those seven years? Will they cover ALL your expenses while you are working? If so, great, but most won't. Your budget has some serious flaws. Food ($600\0) should account for no more than 10-15% of your spending. What about clothing, internet, cable, furniture, car payments, entertainment, dining out, TVs, computers, Blu-Ray, ipods, cell phone, etc.? There are lots of spending categories you haven't taken into account. And it will take you 10 years, a full DECADE, not 7 years to save up $116480 on that salary.

If you are able to do it, I'd seriously consider learning a second language, like Chinese and moving abroad in a decade. That amount of money would stretch much further there, than in Canada. China is a fairly cheap place to live and is rapidly developing. In ten years, it should be a cheap, but decent country to live in.(Third world countries are rapidly developing. Ten years from now China's lifestyle won't be that different than Canada's now). India is another place you could consider moving. Money in the third world stretches much further than in the developed world.

In my opinion, no its still not enough when you're earning 8/hr.You may still want to have another part time job. If your buying foods plus additional taxes and for me its sill not enough if your paying those bills. Yes if your wife will work also you guys will survive, $24k a year is not enough trust me. I know lots of person who's working above that amount but stillhaving problem in paying their bills.

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seems good to me. you'd be doing better than a lot of people... but wont you have any expenses in those 7 years? how are you just going to save all of your money? I think you might need to revisit that calculation...