Canadian Personal Finance Blog

A lot of high tech tools out there to do your financial planning with, I have seen a lot of them, but for the high and mighty “rich folk” they do it “old school”. Have a look at how Larry Ellison does his budgeting! Now that is really “kickin’ it old school”! Scrawled on a single piece of paper, that shows real confidence in your abilities.

What does Larry’s budget look like, you may ask (in case you didn’t click that link?):

Expenditures

1. Lifestyle - annual $20m
2. Interest accrual - annual $75m
3. Villa in Japan - $25m
4. New yacht - $194m - over 3 yrs
5. America’s Cup - $80m - over 3 yrs
6. UAD - 12m over 3 yrs

I feel sorry for him, I really do. Makes my whining about my car payments on my 4 year old Montana Van seem insignificant, don’t it? UAD is another company, I believe. If Larry Ellison can spend the time to figure out a budget, so can you! –C8j

OK, so for my American readers the kind of alledged “graft” described here is nothing compared to million dollar toilets, but in Canada $100M is still a wack-load of money!

Evidently the Depart of National Defense was bilked (allegedly) out of over $100M in phony billings, the following article alleges. Why do I care? Well I still work in the Computer I.T. world and I am always astounded that people don’t think this happens much. Any time you are buying a large number of big ticket items, this kind of alleged “middle man skimming” is going to happen. Now seeing the houses of the alleged perpetrators, your opinion might be that this is a “slam dunk” case, but maybe they had really profitable paper routes? Worked a lot of paid overtime? Won the lottery?

If this is true $100M dollars in moneys lost, is a LARGE wack of money, that the government can ill-afford these days. They could hire the “Big Cajun I.T. Group” and I’d promise to keep the skimming down to less than $10M Canadian over the length of the contract (I’d also keep meticulous records, in case Revenue Canada wants to audit).

–C8j