Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for March 13th, 2007

The great financial site FMF had an interesting posting with an interesting downside to Dividend ReInvestment Plans. And I quote:

Generally, I think they are a good deal if you’re interested in one stock in particular as they decrease costs in acquiring the stock. However, you must be willing to deal with extra paperwork as each DRIP will be its own account (as far as I know) versus being able to hold many stocks in one brokerage account.

Now I never have seen that with my holdings that I have DRiP “turned on” for, and it sounds like a royal pain in the tuchos, if that is the case. Not sure if this is a regulatory thing in the states, or their trading account owners screwing around, but this would drive me crazy as well. It also means that the power of the DRiP, which is adding more stock, and thus making future dividends larger, kind of gets lost in this type of set up, no? Seems kind of odd.

The root of all evil, John Chow (he is so evil, he has black roots, I hear (and that is a commentary about his coiffeur, not a racial slur or epithet!)) is giving away a Nintendo Wii. To enter, all you have to do is write a blog post about it. This is mine. I want my Wii! The contest is sponsored by 1234Pens.com. They make promotional pens. John’s evilness is only outdone by his love of dim sum, and fine restaurants in Vancouver.

And this is my 500th Posting too!!!!!

Apologies for the alteration of our Hymn Nationale, but it is topical. Our amigos at Stats Canada are putting out Census info, which for a “stat head” like me is hours of fun and excitement (yes I really do need to get more of a life).

Between 2001 and 2006, Canada’s population increased 5.4%, the first time since 1991 that the census-to-census growth rate has accelerated. This acceleration during the past five years was due to higher levels of immigration.

Woo Hoo! Canada is the place to come to I guess for immigrants (speaking as the son of immigrants, I am glad to see it). Even though I think I have Quebecois blood in me (growing up in Montreal), I have no aspersions about “Pure Laine” attitudes either. We have 31,612,897 in Canada at the moment of the Census, so that is cool, I remember when Canada only had 21,000,000 folks living here.

If you want to read all about the Census data go here and you can revel in data by the gross or metric tonne!

Getting back to the happy world of Finance, those of us who invested in Nortel will be heartened to see that the SEC is going after some of the former Execs who allegedly defrauded we investors out of millions (or at least the company). The folks charged are not facing criminal prosecution however it is civil, so the SEC is going after their money (and the bonuses they allegedly fraudulently received for having Nortel “return to solvency”). Should be an interesting litigation, which I will be watching closely.