Canadian Personal Finance Blog

The topic of what my household spends money on has been discussed before, but here is as a percentage of my entire expenditures, what my family spent it’s money on last month (April 2008)

• Tax 25.24%
• Recreation 19.68%
• Groceries 13.11%
• Insurance 8.88%
• Mortgage Int 5.55%
• Utilities 3.94%
• Auto 3.54%
• RRSP 3.04%
• Commuting 2.70%
• Savings (non RRSP) 2.28%
• Other 12.04%

These numbers are relatively trustworthy since I use Quicken fairly religiously, and my expenses are mostly tracked there (and we don’t really use a lot of cash in our household).

Financial Scary Things

Recreation being 20% of the money I spent things on last month. That is down to my kids recreational activities (basketball). That is one hell of a lot of money, and that is not registration fees or anything like that, that is money spent on going to and coming from and being at tournaments. That one scared the nickels out of my piggy bank.

Why was Insurance there? I pay for my house insurance in one payment every year, and I had to pay it last month. This month it will be big again, because I have to pay my car insurance as well. I also have on going Life Insurance costs that come up for my wife and myself (that was 9% of my spending).

Commuting, is actually the cost of bus passes for my daughters to be able to go to school, so that is not an insignificant amount of capital spent either.

Financial Oddities

The money I am paying in mortgage interest costs is only 6% of my expenditures in a month? Wow, that is really not a whole heck of a lot in comparison to say the amount I spend on Groceries (13%). I honestly don’t know if that is good or bad, it’s mostly confusing, I guess. Anyone care to hazard a guess, I am open to interpretations.

I am also putting 5% away in savings of sorts, in comparison to my total expenditures for the month. Since you don’t know how much I spent last month (no I am not saying what that number is), it’s kind of hard to figure out if this is a good or bad amount (it actually isn’t too bad, and I have to keep remembering that one).

Financial Insights

There are areas where spending can be curtailed, and there will be areas where spending will stop for a while too (specifically recreation), so that is a good thing. My guess is the Auto side of things is going to go up with the cost of gas continuing to go up as well.  I think also this is not reflecting debt repayments either (as this is not a category in Quicken) except for specific mortgage interest as a cost basis point. I’ll need to look at that more as well.

Any comments or insights from my readership appreciated.

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?

This past weekend, I got to enjoy an out of town tournament with my daughter and we had a great time as usual, however, there was one incident that marred the weekend a little.

The parents typically get lost easily (I include myself in that group), so we typically convoy to gymnasiums from hotels so we don’t all get lost. I had a small convoy behind me, and just as we came off a parkway in Hamilton, we came to a set of lights. We stopped, the light turned green, I turned left chatted with my passenger, looked in my rear view mirror and my convoy was gone!

That was very strange, but we went on to the gym, and I called the members of the convoy to find out whether they had turned left to go to a Tim Horton’s or the like. No, the car behind me “dropped” it’s transmission as it’s driver put their foot down on the accelerator. My heart sunk when I heard that because that is one of my pet paranoia’s (car breaking down in strange city).

This Dad luckily had roadside assistance, so he got it towed to the dealership, who declared the transmission “Dead on Arrival”, and gave him three options:

1. Replace with brand new transmission
2. Replace with rebuilt transmission
3. Walk away from the van

This Dad wasn’t sure what to do, so he rightly decided to take a rental and figure out what to do and deal with it on Monday. Now over the next 24 hours, the Dad made a plan and decided to go with option (3) and not put good money after bad in this situation. He will find another car, and deal with it, instead of attempting to nurse this old clunker any more.

How the Heck do you Decide?

When do you pull the plug in this situation. This Dad did the right thing, he deliberated, called his wife, discussed it with her, they made a plan and are executing it, but I am always amazed when people can make that decision.

I can look back on decisions I have made and figure out whether they are right or wrong, but only in hindsight, making a BIG decision like, “let’s push the car off the cliff” causes me to go into decision brain freeze. I sit there make lists argue all sides of the decision and then usually don’t decide, or procrastinate. Luckily my mechanic is very honest and makes the decision for me (i.e., “Alan this thing is a death trap and I am not fixing it any more, go get another car”).

How do you decide when it is time to get rid of a car? When is “enough” money spent on a car?