Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Yes the new Year has begun, and naturally I procrastinated and am now a day behind, oh well.
I didn’t actually procrastinate in terms of this site, I am working on my new project and forgot to post here, so my apologies.

Start Your Year Out Right

How can you do that on the Personal Finance side of things? Make sure your previous year is closed off and paid off. If you haven’t then it’s time to figure out how to deal with residual debts from 2007 (I don’t mean your mortgage, but I do mean Credit debt). Now is the time to make a financial plan. Remember without a plan how can you tell how you are doing?

Simple Financial Plan for 2008

Here is a simple skeleton plan for you to work from:

• We will put our maximum amount in our RRSP for this year.
• We will put $3000 in each child’s RESP (or as much as we can).
• We will pay off all credit card debt and will put together a plan to pay off all residual debt (lines of credit etc.,) in three years.
• We will save $N for a vacation fund (yes, I believe in vacations, I just never go on them).
• We will pay down $M (where M is greater than the minimum amount for the year) on our Mortgage, or will save that amount for the down payment on buying our house.
• We will pay off our Car Loan quicker than our creditors want.
• Figure out how much we spent at Christmas and start saving a Christmas fund for this year.

Simple little plan, take it, expand it, remove parts but build from it too. Keep track of how you are doing and you should be many miles ahead on December 31 2008.