Canadian Personal Finance Blog

One of the things I have learned over the years is that if you drive on your snow tires for too long in the spring (or say over an entire summer), your snow tires degrade very quickly during that time, and they soon become useless if you are not careful. It is a hard balance to figure out when you should remove your snow tires in the spring (in Ottawa, in the Sault or places north, I am sure this isn’t even being discussed yet). I called my mechanic and he is inundated with folks wanting their snow tires off and their summer tires back on, so I know that I am at least part of the crowd.

When I was younger one year, I figured I’d save myself some money because I needed to get NEW summer tires but my winter tires were relatively new, so I decided to stay on the winter tires all summer, for my troubles I ended up with:

1. Bad gas mileage
2. Badly worn snow tires (that had 1 season left in them after that summer, and they didn’t really do that well that 1 season either)
3. A noisy car all summer (snow tires on clear pavement are noisier)

Time to take off the snow tires and see if you can save some money on the $1.20 a liter gasoline here in Ottawa.

CPP and EI

Normally around this time of year I am lucky enough to have my CPP and EI payments reach their maximum, I won’t say exactly when since if you remember correctly, if I tell you this, you could then figure out my take home pay (thanks to Michael James on Money for that one). This year however because I have been transfered to a different pay area, my CPP and EI maximums are lost and I must start again from scratch. This means next year, I will get the extra money paid back on my taxes, however, I must continue overpaying, because our accounting system does not believe I paid anywhere else. A frustrating issue, that I have asked about, but given no real good explanation about.

Quicken and TD Not Playing Nice

So TD/Canada Trust has changed their on line banking interface somehow so that now my Quicken cannot do an automagic update from my TD accounts daily (it used to be able to), but now it fails, and I have to go onto the Easyline web site and do the downloads manually, which is annoying. Anybody else run into this interesting bug?