Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Given our reliance on electronic devices, especially in the area of Financial planning and tracking (you know like Quicken, Will-Expert, Inventories, etc.,), the following posting by Bruce Schneier is quite topical and worrisome.

If you are like me and you have a copy of Quicken on your portable computer, all it would take to break in and steal my accounts, would be to steal my laptop (and break into the passwords I have on all of this, so it isn’t THAT easy), but the point made that 20 years ago this kind of theft wasn’t possible, because the technology never existed is very intriguing.

Where do you store your old Tax Returns? Most likely locked away somewhere or at least stored in a safe place in your house, but if you file electronically, then you most likely have a copy on your computer too. Given all the “hocus pocus” viruses and spyware out there, it’s important to keep your computer’s data and the computer itself SAFE and SECURE. Backup disks (DVD, CDROM, floppy, thumb drives, whatever) all need to put in safe secure places folks. Keep this in mind, don’t make it easy to steal your financial data!

–C8j

So Bill Gates’ tax return is so complex it has it’s own computer? Well that is the alleged story in this posting. Wish I had such problems, I’m sure a Commodore 64 could do my taxes.

I guess when your net worth is around $47 Billion things can get complicated?

How are you going to do your taxes this year? Me, I am using Quicktax again, it’s a little more complicated, but I am starting to figure out the things I do wrong every year:

1. I always forget to add the life insurance my company pays for (a taxable benefit) in my initial estimates (before I get my T-4 slip). Previous years I get excited about how much I am going to get back, then my T-4 shows up and sometimes I actually OWE money! Real downer, this year I remembered to add that in.
2. My employee stock program, I keep forgetting that stuff too.

It’s always easy to do estimates, if you kept your last pay stub from the previous year. There is a good TODO for December 2006, save your last pay stub!

–C8j