Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for December 11th, 2008

Strikes and Their Effects

In Ottawa we are living through a mass transit strike, and the first day’s joy was compounded by having the remnants of a large snowstorm causing driving conditions to be horrendous in the morning. The bright side is that a lot of people decided not to go to work yesterday, however, today may be a different story. 

The disagreement between the City and the Bus Drivers is not my concern right now (although as a personal aside the Union Leader really could use a few Dale Carnegie courses on how to deal with the media, his demeaner is very unsympathetic), my problem is that I must now drive my kids back and forth to school each day, which is an economic headache (luckily with 67 cent a liter gas it is not as much of a hardship). I am assuming the strike shouldn’t be too protracted, although, one never knows in these situations.

My heritage is strongly trade unionist (both sides of my family have roots in the trade union movement), however, when strikes inconvenience me I find myself much less sympathetic to my Union upbringing. 

BCE Sale Still On?

BCE keeps acting like their sale is going to go through. Interesting since no one in the investment community seems to think this, but BCE has put through a bond term assuming that their sale goes through. The price of BCE shares certainly does not reflect a $32 sale price right now, maybe it is a bargain, but if the sale does not happen, maybe it is still too high?

TD Prime Rate drops only 0.5%

I noted today that TD did lower it’s “prime” rate in reaction to the Bank of Canada’s rate cut, but only by 0.5% and not the entire 0.75%, which is what I suspected might happen. It’s good that they did lower their rate, but again, they are attempt to shave a bit more money and make more on loans. Lower rates are good, but getting the entire rate drop would even be better. Please give us our full cut Mr. TD.

Advent Financial Calendar Box Day 12

You open today and you find a bank passbook, but it is for a bank account you don’t remember. Do you have dormant bank accounts or accounts you have forgotten about? Maybe it is time to shut them down (if they haven’t already been shut down) and try to get whatever money is in them back into your own hands.  The banking industry takes that money for their own, by either killing the account with service charges, or simply marking the account as inactive and then taking the assets after a suitable period of time. I had a group of accounts still open, that I have shut down in the past little while. I viewed them as a security risk as well, if someone could get access to them, they could attempt to work from that account’s “good will” and set up credit vehicles (in my name) and then I would be in trouble. 

Shut down those old unused accounts, before the end of the year.