Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for January 15th, 2008

Where has all the money gone?

So this topic comes from a comment from my friend Michael James on commenting on my “self pitying” posting of getting older yesterday. The quip is actually quite topical, I have earned well over a million dollars in my 20+ years of working. Where did all that money go?

If you think about it, where it always goes:

• Taxes
  • Federal Taxes which had to have eaten 10-20% of it over the years
  • Provincial Taxes which ate about the same if not a little less
  • GST and PST can’t even fathom how much I have paid for those little consumption taxes.
  • Municipal Property Taxes, which keep going up as well. How much? 4-8% of my income is a good guess.
  • Employment Insurance payments, and I have never claimed against this system (touch wood). That is money completely lost.
  • Canada Pension Plan Payments (and a little QPP as well), hopefully I’ll get some of that back one day.

  That’s about 25-45% of the money right there, and I haven’t spent a cent yet!

• Living, which might include rent and mortgage payments and such, which has to be about 10-20% of that money.

So I have about 40% of my income left and I haven’t fed anyone, bought a single coffee or gone on a wild spending binge?

It’s interesting just to look back and if I told myself when I started working that I’d have earned over a million dollars by now, but not be living in a villa on the Riviera, I don’t think my younger self would have believed it.

Tax Preparation Coming

It is that time of the year to start looking at tax software and start monkeying around with my taxes. Our friend the Canadian Capitalist is looking at Ufile instead of Quicktax this year. Quicktax seems to be cutting the number of possible returns to be done down to TWO (2) but I need to research this more to figure out whether I can use this or not, given my oldest daughter now is old enough and has income. Stay tuned, I am sure I will rant more about this topic very soon.

Move Complete

My Blogspot account is now permanently aimed at this site. The move over is complete, I hope.