Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for January 16th, 2007

I have been bashing around my Resume at work, since that is something you should do at the start of every year (at least) to keep it up to date (since you never really know when you might be in need of a resume), and I got to thinking, what would my Financial Resume look like?

What do I mean by a financial resume? Well I have been “managing” my money for over 25 years now (actually all my life, but for real since I was about 21), and if someone asked me, “Do you think you did a good job?”, I’d say, “No”, but I’d never be able to give them a reason as to why I think I have done a sub-par job.

So how would I write my financial resume? The hard part is trying to remember all of the financial “decisions” that you actually have made in your life time (significant ones, let’s not get down to the minutia of how many coffees you bought at work and such).

The easiest ones to remember for me are the purchases of my two homes:

Buy house #1, already had 1 child and another on the way. I was positive I couldn’t afford a house, but I gave my Agents a “can’t go any higher than this” price, and then naturally ended up purchasing a home $10,000 more than that. In hindsight, I was being far too conservative, and could afford the home (with some help from family). The house itself didn’t appreciate in value, but I did manage to sell it for what I bought it for.

• I ended up out the cost of moving out (I paid for movers), the commission on selling the house, and the cost of the new roof and furnace I put in the house.

Overall I would say that this financial decision was a good one, even with a small “loss”. The money I would have been spending on renting would have been “lost”, whereas the equity I paid down on my house went into my pocket (with 0% interest, unfortunately), but still it was worthwhile, and my family needed more space.

Tomorrow, more houses bought and odd decisions on investing that worked in spite of the bad reasons behind it.