Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Personal Finances and Consumer Concerns, essays, stories, examples and how to articles with a distinctly Canadian Point of View

Archive for December, 2007

2007 The Year That Was

Monday, December 31st, 2007

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

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!

Receipts and Friday Random Thoughts

Friday, December 28th, 2007

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.

Survey Results

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

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).

www.financialwebring.com