Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Where has all the money gone?

So this topic comes from a comment from my friend Michael James on commenting on my “self pitying” posting of getting older yesterday. The quip is actually quite topical, I have earned well over a million dollars in my 20+ years of working. Where did all that money go?

If you think about it, where it always goes:

• Taxes
  • Federal Taxes which had to have eaten 10-20% of it over the years
  • Provincial Taxes which ate about the same if not a little less
  • GST and PST can’t even fathom how much I have paid for those little consumption taxes.
  • Municipal Property Taxes, which keep going up as well. How much? 4-8% of my income is a good guess.
  • Employment Insurance payments, and I have never claimed against this system (touch wood). That is money completely lost.
  • Canada Pension Plan Payments (and a little QPP as well), hopefully I’ll get some of that back one day.

  That’s about 25-45% of the money right there, and I haven’t spent a cent yet!

• Living, which might include rent and mortgage payments and such, which has to be about 10-20% of that money.

So I have about 40% of my income left and I haven’t fed anyone, bought a single coffee or gone on a wild spending binge?

It’s interesting just to look back and if I told myself when I started working that I’d have earned over a million dollars by now, but not be living in a villa on the Riviera, I don’t think my younger self would have believed it.

Tax Preparation Coming

It is that time of the year to start looking at tax software and start monkeying around with my taxes. Our friend the Canadian Capitalist is looking at Ufile instead of Quicktax this year. Quicktax seems to be cutting the number of possible returns to be done down to TWO (2) but I need to research this more to figure out whether I can use this or not, given my oldest daughter now is old enough and has income. Stay tuned, I am sure I will rant more about this topic very soon.

Move Complete

My Blogspot account is now permanently aimed at this site. The move over is complete, I hope.

An interesting new blogger on the scene that I enjoy reading called Loonies and Sense . A very good posting for our American cousins doing some Canadian fiscal and financial translations for you in case you were curious what we were talking about when we say things like RRSP and RESP. This blogger is always brave enough to publish her goals and plans for financial security, which I just don’t have the guts to do (I have these goals, I just don’t feel right putting them out in the public eye).

It’s not easy for we Canadian Financial Bloggers because at times we are segregating our subject matter from two of the largest Financial subscribers out there in the United States and Europe, however, for most of us, it is a labor of “love” (or we are gluttons for punishment).

Related Canadian Financial Bloggers

• Canadian Capitalist
• Loonies and Sense
• Canadian Money Advisor
• Canadian Dream: Free at 45 (dream on big guy
• The Dividend Guy

There are other great non financial blogs in my right column in the very fine print that you can have a look at as well. We Canadians are an entertaining group of folk, once you get to know us.

OK,

I have had enough SPAM from the spamming Adsense nitwits on the net, so there will be no more anonymous comments allowed on this blog (apologies folks, but I spend more time cleaning things up than I do writing these days).

If anyone has any blogspot related ideas on combatting this SCOURGE of comment spam, please post a comment :-). (Those I won’t delete).

Click on any of the mentions of SPAM and see my views on this.