Canadian Personal Finance Blog

For me 2007 has been a great year, but not necessarily in the financial areas I wished for, but that is not all life is about. With an end of year recap in mind, I give you the:

Best of Canadian Financial Rants 2007

• I started off the year finding out that my Pension was about to be capped by my employer, so I asked the Question: How Much is Your Pension Worth? .
• In February I outlined the Tim Horton’s Savings Plan where if you drink a lot of Timmy’s coffee you might want to go and have a look.
• In March my son’s train set inspired me to write Zen, Thomas the Tank Engine and the Art of Financial Planning, and I’d like to point out his train set has grown since then too.
• In April my continued hatred of the Pay Day Loan industry erupted in the post Pay Day Loans No, No, No! and I continue to get inquiries about advertising on my site from these kinds of places.
• In May I ran through my yearly scenario of how much my wife is worth in terms of the government with My Wife is Worth How Much?
• June I did a case study on getting refunds on being overcharged with Refunds on Overcharging .
• My yearly bank visit in July to get Free Banking was highlighted in Bank Fees and how you shouldn’t be paying for your banking.
• If you want healthy kids, is it an expensive thing? In August I tackled this topic with The High Price of Healthy Kids .
• How do you retire with kids at home? was a question I asked in September that I am still trying to figure out myself.
• My daughter started looking at Universities in October, which caused me to write, University Costs Holy Crap!
• The quarterly status report concept I talked about in November and I truly believe in it, so try out the Quarterly Personal Financial Report.
• Given the amount of snow in Ottawa this December Snowbound Personal Finances was an obvious topic to write about.

This isn’t really a “Best of” kind of list, just a cross section of my writings for the year.

Some other interesting points about this year:

• I wrote approximately 371 postings, which is more than one a day (holy cow).
• Forty (40) was my monthly maximum written in May.

Hope you enjoyed it, I am hoping for some changes in the New Year, but ’til then:

Happy and Prosperous New Year to You All!

Keep your receipts

Remember all that spending you did before Christmas? Hope you kept your receipts! Why you may ask? Let’s run down a few of the important points about keeping your receipts (and maybe scanning them into your computer for archiving?):

• You have a record of where you shopped, and this is important because what happens if another charge appears from that same store next month? If you don’t have your receipt, you might think, oh they are just billing slowly and pay it again. This happened to me more than once.
• So you know exactly how much you spent, and you can figure out a plan now of how to pay off the gross national debt of Zimbabwe off (that is my pet name for my Christmas debt hangover).
• You know where you didn’t shop as well. You end up with a strange charge from somewhere you know you didn’t shop, you can have that charge reversed.

Remember this doesn’t mean you have to hoard all those little pieces of paper, just make sure you keep them for a little while, just to be safe.

Random Thoughts for a Friday

• Jim Flaherty is now saying that big income tax cuts are now many years away and the federal government cannot do any more large cuts. His statement is that he thinks there will not be a huge surplus for 2008 and thus no room to cut taxes any more. Gee thanks Jim, hope Santa left you a nice lump of coal in your stocking, and maybe Rudolph left you a plum pudding on your pillow.
• Phased Retirement? Remember Big Caj, we value you and don’t want you to retire, because we don’t trust our younger employees? If I can retire, I will retire, no phases, Hast La Vista and farewell!
• Some nasty happenings in Pakistan I think could forebode some very high gas prices soon. Instability in that whole region is going to really zap us in the pocket books. It will also mean a continued strong Canadian Dollar as well, due to Canada’s oil reserves.

I figured I’d try out a survey from Blogspot to just see if anyone would actually “vote” and I was impressed to see the following results:

If you found $213,498.42 on the ground what would you do with it?

• Pick it up, spend it, and then lament my loss 28%
• Yell, “Hey anybody drop their wad?” 13%
• Pick it up, and give it to the Salvation Army lady on the corner 10%
• Take $3.14, and feel guilty for doing that 1%
• None of the Above 48%

What does this mean? Not sure, it was my first survey, but interesting that some folks enjoyed my humorous answer #2. Another survey may be coming soon.

Changes Coming

Watch this blog for changes that are coming very soon, I hope. For those who are on the RSS feed, you won’t notice anything (sorry).