Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Start with a list of your debts and set up the following categories for these debts:

Short Term: Now ’til a year from now (e.g. credit cards)
Mid Term : 1 year to 3 years (e.g. Car Loans, Home Improvement loans)
Long Term: 3+ years (e.g. Mortgage, Student Loans)

So typically your mortgage would be Long Term, a car loan might be mid or longer term, credit card bills SHORT term (if at all). Block them out and make up a plan on how you will pay off these debts. If you are really “anal” about it all then in your plan put down how you will CELEBRATE the retirement of that debt (without going back into debt, right?!).

With a plan at least you can SEE what you want to do, and can stop worrying as much –C8j

So I have mentioned before that I have been using the President’s Choice Mastercard for grocery purchases and let me tell you they are certainly adding up. We seem to be averaging about $100 in free groceries every quarter, which is just fine by me! We did “cheat” a bit and transfer over a bunch of Petro-canada points and won some extra points for using our card, but if in the course of my normal shopping someone wants to give me free groceries? Bring it on!

There are other “afinity” cards out there, that give you direct cash back, but given I shop at Loblaws and Your independent grocers, I am not complaining about this system either.

–C8j