Canadian Personal Finance Blog

See, I told you this week’s thematic premise was procrastination. I procrastinated writing this entry, just to see whether it helps or not. Normally I write early in the morning and have something out by about 8:00 AM eastern time, but today I am writing this after my lunch, let’s see if it makes things better or not.

Glad to see that the Canadian Central bank did not raise key interest rates, so debtors such as myself have a little while longer to bask in the joy of low-ish interest rates. Maybe they are procrastinating about raising interest rates? Anything is possible. Hope they aren’t procrastinating about lowering interest rates however (hey this procrastinating thing seems to be a double edged sword). One guy from TD says interest rates won’t change for the rest of the year, but remember that folks said to hold Nortel in 2001 also (free advise is worth every penny you paid for it).

Our finance minister is looking at the outlandish ATM fees charged by banks and such. Hopefully Count Floyd can get some traction on this issue, but not too much, being a share holder in major banks. The banks claim they must charge you $1.50 (at least) if you use a banking machine that isn’t from your bank, so they can pay for upkeep of the “money vending machines”, pardon me but WTF?!?!? To quote Tony Soprano, don’t pee in my ear and tell me it’s raining! What really infuriates me is that the banks now have changed the machines that are in their own branches into WHITE ATM machines, so they not only ding you for it not being your bank, but the bank branch adds $1.50 charge of it’s own! Holy crap! That is a boat load of money to be made there.

Stats Canada points out that there are no more Federal Government Folks now than there were in 1995, but that was after a massive cut back at the end of the 90’s, so we are really back to where we started from, except now the CPA (”Core Public Administration”) is much older (haven’t I said that before?). What to do about an aging labour force? Darn good question, hopefully they aren’t procrastinating about their retirement, because it will fall on my generation to support them otherwise.

Well back to work, what else can I procrastinate on?