Canadian Personal Finance Blog

For my regular readers (you know who you are), this past summer I spent a while hunting down roofing contrators in the Ottawa area, to get my roof replaced. This usually entailed me having someone see how lousy my roof looked from the street and knocking on my door (which gave me a very strange cross section of quotes, let me tell you). I then phoned a bunch of contractors and found out that thanks to the building boom in Ottawa, no one likes to do 1 roof much (except for the guys that wander around giving out quotes to people’s who’s roofs look like crap).

I came across a new web site for the folks in Toronto (yes the GTA, or as we call it in Ottawa, The Big Smoke), which will help you get quotes for your home renovation,Toronto Roofing Quotes which looks interesting. It helps you get quotes from up to 5 contractors in the GTA to get a home renovation job done. The site only gets you quotes, you choose which contractor you want to go with (and checking with the Better Business Bureau for your area, is always a good thing to do in this area (I have watched enough Holmes on Homes to know that one)). I can’t use the service, because, I doubt these contractors want to come up the 401 to replace my windows (this coming summer’s money pit), but if you live in Toronto (Big Smoke, or Toronto the Good) and need renovation, this would be a good site to start your renovation contractor search with.

Now I must put a caveat that I am getting paid to say this by PayPerPost, but I have checked out the web site, and it looks like a good idea, wish we had one in Ottawa.

–C8j

So, I don’t think I really completely understand the ins and outs and the subtleties of Quicken Home & Business 2008, especially how it can control my spending. I do know how to get information out of it, that I can then interpret myself, but it is mostly “after the fact” data like how much I spent last year, how much I earned, how much my investments grew etc., . After initially looking at our spending habits for last year I had a huge panic attack about how we were grossly overspending, but then I wondered how much Income I had, looked at that and wondered how I had that much income, and then after looking at the “Balance Sheet” report, scratched my head some more looking at the value of my investments. Now I have to be careful with the investments, because those include the kids RESP monies, which skews the information a great deal (since that isn’t my money).

I have attached the report graph, without the key, but you can guess which one might be taxes easily, can’t you?

My Spending Graph

All of this being said, I think I can see where there can be some savings in the coming year, and that makes Quicken a useful tool for that, now if I could just figure out how to use the budgeting aspects to keep my spending habits in line, that would be even better!

Oh and remember to return those books to the Library, those late fees are going to kill you!