Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for December 13th, 2006

Well, not really, but I got clever and figured out a smart way to back up my blogs on my machine, by setting up Wordpress on my local machine. Wordpress has a really useful IMPORT utility which worked fine for one blog, but died in the middle of backing up this blog, which in turn shut down this site for about 1/2 the day today (apologies dear reader).

I have remedied MOST of the problems, but I have a nagging issue with paragraphs and them not being correctly formatted, but I will endevor to fix that soon too.

My most humblest of apologies gentle reader. –C8j

That is what Stats Canada is telling us today. The Median for wealth has doubled since 1970 ’til 2005 (a 35 year period), however, that is the Median not the Mean or Average. This means that because there are more very rich people, it drags this Median up, however because the gap is so large, the data ends up being skewed by it. The top 5% of families fortunes have gone up a great deal in this time while “middle income” and lower income families have not shared in this growth of wealth to the same extent.

In young families the Median for wealth actually dropped (meaning they are losing the fight right now). If you are older than 35 then your wealth median went up by 40%, holy cow!

What does all this number mish mash really mean? The rich are getting richer, and the rest of us, aren’t keeping up! Sorry folks, that’s just the way it is right now.

Who cares? Don’t be so Cavalier when it comes to hearing that kind of news on the radio. On the surface most Canadians go “CRAP” everything from the U.S. is going to cost more and when I go to Florida this winter everything is going to be more expensive too. While this is true, you need to remember the flip side of the coin which is that Canada’s biggest trading partner might want to buy more things from us. Right now a large number of Canadian companies are in a bind because of the dollars meteoric rise and they are thinking of cutting Canadian staff, because the staff and the products they create are too expensive. If the dollar drops it becomes more attractive to set up shop in Canada (if you are American or from other countries). Keep this in mind the next time you hear about a dropping dollar.

Why is the dollar dropping you may ask, well for the reason that our balance of trade with the U.S. is dropping (we are importing more things from the U.S. and/or the U.S. is NOT importing as many things from Canada). It’s all nicely laid out in this article from Stats Canada (I love their daily updates, so much info to learn there). The graph shows that the drop in exports to the U.S. but our Imports have remained the same. Dropping fuel prices is helping this one out too.

For me, it’s a good thing, because I work for a company that exports to the U.S. a great deal! –C8j