Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Yesterday I found out that there is a class action suit that is being brought by a group of employees against my current employer.  I am unfortunately not part of the class, as I am still too young to join into the group, which is unfortunate, but it will be interesting to see if this group can extract a change with this suit. The suit has to do with the Pension changes made last year, where my employer changed from a Defined Benefit pension which had been in place for decades to a less expensive pension system.

Retirement Planning

This drastic change to my pension plans last year, meant that my assumptions at the time (though naive, because they assumed I’d make it to 55 or older with this employer) are now flawed.  I have been putting my RRSP money into a spousal RRSP, assuming that I would have a pension and my wife could then draw on the RRSP income thus creating an income splitting model, however, now that my pension will be drastically smaller, I will need to rethink that portion of my plan.

I also need to increase my RRSP inputs, which for the past 20 years have been debilitated by the Pension Adjustment that was in place (I could only put about $2000 a year into my RRSPs), the problem being all that growth that might have happened over the past 20 years is now lost to me, even if the CCRA gives back the RRSP room that I lost from the Pension Adjustment. This problem is kind of like my Golf Game, I need to go back in time and fix it about 20 years ago.

My other hope was an ability to retire earlier than 65 with this pension, but without it, those plans are much less likely, unless I find a new income source that can help compensate for this lost savings.

Would have been nice to have been part of that “Class”, but I must now re-think and re-plan.

But I need $520 for My Loan Shark

BMO has lowered the daily cash withdrawal limit to $500 to help combat debit card fraud (at ATM machines). Interesting idea, evidently the amount of ATM fraud last year was over $160,000,000 for BMO, and this is to slow this down. I don’t actually take large hunks of cash out these days, but more interestingly who ends up paying for this fraud? Does the Bank? The Consumer? Any horror stories from my readers that they care to share? The daily purchase limit is still around $2500 I believe.

No Fed Interest Drop?

That is the word, that in the U.S. there are no further interest rate cuts planned, which might be a very good thing given that Inflation is heating up. Canada has already held the line this month, so it shouldn’t effect the Canadian Dollar, but what might it do to stocks? We shall see.