Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for May, 2008

I figured I’d move my lazy post for the week to Saturday, for those that might wander by and wonder what has been going on, and to reward Friday readers with an actual post and not just me rehashing.

An interesting week, where I got fixated on the high prices of Cell Phones, but a few other bloggers had other interesting posts as well:

• In I am Paying How Much for My Phones and Cell Phones Again , I discuss the relatively large amount of cash I put out for the privilege of being connected in this world. Some very good comments from my readers on these posts, well worth a read.
• In Understanding the BCE Mess, Michael James attempts to decipher the twists and turns in the largest leverage buy out ever. As a shareholder, I hope it settles down some time soon.
• Larry MacDonald had a posting about 7 Good Blog Posts this week including my story about Bar B Q disposal.
• I lamented about the High Cost of Flying and am getting sick of dieing by 1000 service charges.
• The Canadian Capitalist asked the question Is A Costco Membership Worth it? It never made sense for me, but he, as usual, has a good angle on the charges.
• My wife managed to get a credit card so I asked again, My Wife is Worth How Much?
• Over at Free at 45 an interesting article about how to Appeal Your Taxes .

All in all an interesting week.

This week I took a short trip for my company, and I was astounded at how much it ended up costing, just in flight charges.

My company used to have a travel department, where people booked trips for you, found the best deals, but also discussed with you about how you wanted your travel to work. This task was then outsourced and is now being run by Amex Travel, which has a Web Portal that all travel booking must be done through. The booking of the trip is chocked full of questions and then it gives you a staggering array of choices and decisions about cheaper flights and such, which I usually ignore, and then get a nasty note saying I am not playing nicely, but that is for another posting.

This week’s one day travel’s costs were:

• Air Fare alone was $356  which isn’t too bad given I booked fairly late, and I was only doing a day trip.
• Add on a $10 Air Transport Tax
• Add $20 in GST
• Add $35 Airport Improvement Fee
• And you end up with $420.94 total cost
• Whoops forgot there is an $8 service fee that Amex travel throws on top of this, that you only see on your credit card later.

Fine, I had to travel and I had to pay, so I booked it. Away we went, our meetings went well and we finished early, so then we tried come home on an earlier flight. There was room on an earlier flight, but due to the type of the flight booked, I had to pay a $55.00 re-booking fee on top of all of this.

I am in the wrong business, airline travel has more hidden fees and tricks than the Mutual Fund business (OK maybe not, but it feels that way). Luckily I didn’t pay for this out of my own pocket, but now I know why I don’t fly places any more.

I grow weary of losing money $2 at a time on all the service fees thrown on top of the original price of things. Can’t someone just quote me a price and then not kill me adding more to it?

Best Cell Phone Deal one Opinion

My friend that was researching the best Cell Phone deal (for her and her family, I must stress that you must research this for what you want to do with your cell phone) and she has come up with her decision about the ideal Cell Phone service for her.

Survey said…… “PETRO CANADA!!” (Pardon?)

Didn’t expect to hear that one, but to quote her report to me:

$.20/minute, no fees, $20 top up lasts 180 days. Phones paid for by petro points.

$0.05 per text incoming and outgoing. You would have to know how many texts you send etc to compare to a $10 per month plan or 15 cents for sent messages only.

They don’t have auto top up

That is the report, which is helpful to me, as I am near wits end with Bell Mobility. It sounds like Petro Canada is the best to go with if all you want is a phone that you don’t use very much, and you are diligent about re-charging your pay per use service (no auto top up), but I suspect I will check out Virgin, President’s Choice and Petro Points myself.

More Competition Coming

That is the good news for Canadian Consumers, is there is another spectrum auction going on, so there will be more operators, and thus more competition in the coming years. You already see some new faces (OK re-branded faces, with Koodo from Telus and others).

My Cell Phone Woes

After my rant about I am Paying How Much for My Phone? I got some very good comments from my highly intelligent readers, where the folks who want to keep their money are going with pay per use programs as a rule.

• Jerry commented that paying for a Long Distance program with Bell is not a good use of money, as there are many much cheaper programs out there.
• Traciatim pointed out that Fido (aka Rogers) has launched an UNO program where you amalgamate your mobile and home phone systems (might be worth investigating too).
• George commented about his use of Virgin mobile and made the good comment: “…Cheaper options are out there. You just need to find them…”, point taken.
• Ram had some very good points:

- Turn off voicemail in home phone and buy an answering machine. The cost of the answering machine can be recovered with just 6 months of voicemail charges.

- Turn off unwanted features in your phone service. I use only call display and call waiting in my home phone – and additionally voicemail in my cell phone

- Try subscribing to services from the same vendor, that way you can negotiate for a better price

As usual my readers show me the way, and give good advice.

Back in 2005 just when I was starting to blog, I never really knew what I was going to write about (nothing much has changed), so I wrote about the system I put in place to ensure that my kids got their allowances.

As a follow on to the story my oldest child is now 18, so I no longer will be allowed to directly access her bank account any more (something to keep in mind).

Real World Example: Kids Allowances

OK, so back to what this blog is about, real world financial ranting.
For the longest time my wife and I tried to get the kids on an allowance, so that they could learn what money is, how it works and some responsibility, but inevitably, we’d forget for a couple of weeks, try to catch up and eventually just gave up (much to the kids chagrin). Interesting, we were trying to teach the kids responsibility and all it did was show how irresponsible their parents were (now THAT is ironic).

About 6 years ago I was in the TD on one of my yearly visits, getting my bank fees waived for a year, and get them to fix something they had screwed up (I think it was my mortgage that year), when I asked about kids’ bank accounts. My brother sends the girls money every year, and we had got to the point where we didn’t want to just buy them toys with it. The poor woman who’s life I was ruining for the day, said the accounts could be opened then (since the kids had SIN numbers), and the accounts would show up “under” my account on my on line banking.

A day or two later, a light went on in my head. I called the bank on the phone lady (who I now call once a year, because I do most of my banking on line, but couldn’t figure out how to do what I wanted). I asked her to set up weekly transfers from my account to my kids accounts, thus assuring that the money was paid every week (whether I remembered or not).

Well, it has worked, the kids get their weekly allowances AND they actually do things like:

• Buy clothes that they really want
• Have somewhere to put their uncle’s money and can then buy what they want
• Buy presents for their friends birthdays (that one shocked me the first time it happened).

So it seems this experiment has worked, chalk one up for me.

A friend is doing some number crunching trying to figure out which is the cheapest Cell Phone plan that she can get that fits her needs, so her and I have been discussing various pay per use plans (I know something about them because both my daughters have those set ups), I am not sure what her final decision was (I will post it when I know), but this caused me to look at my phone bills and I was flabbergasted to see just how much I pay per month for my phones.

The total this month is $190.00 (approx), for 1 home phone line (with a long distance package) and 2 cell phones all from Bell.

I leave that in a paragraph by itself because I am astounded at that number. That is more than I pay to heat my house and it is about 80% of what I pay in Electric + Natural Gas, this is ridiculous, and I am now banging my head on my desk realizing this is one of my major expenses every month.

I am getting nailed for the long distance plan on my home phone, but I am getting obliterated by long distance charges and text’ing charges on my cell phones. My wife and I save long distance charges by sending text message, however, evidently we send too darn many.

This is my new target for controlling costs, as this is a crazy expense. Anyone care to comment on their cell phone expenses and how they keep this expense down, I am open to suggestions (two tin cans and a piece of wire is one of my ideas right now).

Carnivals This Week

I am sending in posts to carnivals again so you can read some of my previous works at:

• The Carnival of Debt Reduction #141 has my post Debt Reduction is like Teenage Sex.
• The Carnival of Debt Management #53 has the same post up too.