A Financial Haiku
Money badly spent
Big Cajun Man 2010
Far too many regrets to count
Guilt of spending hurts
There you go; for those of you who feel that sometimes my content is a little too low-brow, feel free to comment with your own financial haiku, but please keep it clean.
Being a short week, where I have already published 1 Random Thoughts collection, you might guess that I wouldn’t possibly publish another one on Friday, but you would have guessed wrong. I will be spending most of my weekend locked in gyms officiating basketball games, so I don’t have time to write something new, just have time to borrow other folks work.
The Remainder of my Weekly Writings
- A Philosophical Raga About Value A short raga (i.e. train of thought post) about value, and how seeing that a Hockey Sweater is sold for a lot, does to you on a day where you haven’t had enough sleep.
- Strong Loonies Nothing Scarier than a Strong Loonie The Canadian Dollar (aka the Loonie) is now at parity with it’s American Cousin, which means Canadians can spend freely in the U.S.
- Random Thoughts: April Fools Interest rates, April Fools jokes, & the launch of the Apple iPad. Find out what else happened this past week. #AprilFools.
From the Blogosphere
What were some of these good works?
- Preet pulls out a well discussed topic with Gold Plated Member of Parliament Pension Plans and those are quite the pork barreled pensions. Being a civil servant, we pay for our pension, but the parliamentary pension is just outlandish
- Michael James points out in Annuities and Inflation that an annuity can be an interesting idea, if it does not compensate for inflation, it could be a losing game.
- The Canadian Capitalist gives us A Peek Into Warren Buffet’s Personal Portfolio where Mr. Buffett makes most of his money on dividends. It would be nice to have his money, then I wouldn’t be writing Haiku’s hoping to make a little extra ca$h
- The Frugal Trader over at the Million Dollar Journey gives us a Smith Manoeuvre Portfolio update April 2010 which outlines how they are doing with this alternate (if not risky) savings idea. I am not espousing this system (in fact I would warn against it), but I feel for those who are interested they should go over and read from someone who is less negative on this idea
- Mike at the Four Pillars writes about 2010 RESP Contribution Rules and Withdrawal Rules a useful article for someone like me with lots of money in RESPs wanting to take it out!
- Gail V-O writes about Pyaing it Forward which I agree is a good barometer about just how happy you are. Sometimes, helping someone else is the best way to make ourselves happier
- Canadian Financial DIY follows up with Investing in Malt Wisky II – Unique Risk not quite as interesting at the infamous, “If I bought beer instead of Nortel stock, I’d be farther ahead”
Time for the tip off!
Thanks for the mention. I’m almost caught up after my golf trip.
Thanks a lot for the link.
Isn’t it a little misleading to say civil servants pay for their pensions? It seems to me that they pay for half their pensions, with the rest picked up by the tax payer. I’ve seen CUPE propaganda misleadingly claiming that civil servants pay 10.5% of every dollar they make towards their pension. What they don’t explain is half of that is CPP contributions that they pay like everybody else. Paying 5.5% of income below $47,000 and 8.4% for above is a pretty sweet deal for a fully indexed 70% of your highest income that can start as early as 55 years of age if you get 35 years in by then. Maybe not as good as for MPs, but MPs have virtually no job security and have to win at least two elections to qualify for a pension at all.
I don’t think it is very helpful to get defensive about your benefits or complain about others. I certainly wouldn’t want to be a MP, it doesn’t pay well enough for the aggravation!
True, it does take a rare breed to be an MP, and I’m not sure it isn’t a mutant breed, but we can discuss that further later.
The Civil Service Pension is a sweet deal, but it does have it’s drawbacks (i.e. you have to work in the government, which is another rare breed too (after twenty years in the private sector, very interesting place to work))
Thanks for the mention Big C. Have a great weekend!