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It is time for the first major give-away on this site (ever).

Intuit was kind enough to contact me and send me 2 copies of  QuickTax Standard, which I will gladly give away (since I already bought a copy for myself before they sent me these (yes, irony is a good friend of mine)).

Legalities: Please note, I do use Quicktax (and Quicken) but the copies I have I paid for with my own money (more fool me), I think these are useful tools, but I am not being directly paid to run this give-away (in fact I am out of pocket because I have to ship it to you).  I do run advertising for Intuit to sell Quicktax, as you have seen over the past few weeks, but this give-away is not connected to those ads.

How can you win one of these free copies? Well, let’s first start out with some of the ground rules:

Free Software

Ground Rules

1. I assume  you are a regular reader of this blog, so all you need to do is leave a comment on this post with your e-mail address to enter (no mailing address needed yet, just an e-mail).
2. Given this software is for Canadian Taxes, you should really be a Canadian, or have a use for it (don’t just enter so that you can re-sell it on E-bay that is just scummy).
3. Your comment needs to have a good reason why you want this software (if you say you are having problems with the CRA and are thinking about going for a short airplane trip, you are disqualified), yes, I want it is a valid reason, but so dull. Also remember I have ANTI-SPAM filters on my comments, so if your comment looks like SPAM it might not get entered (or if you are a SPAMMER!).
4. If you subscribe to my feed, you will have my undying respect and your Karmic mojo will increase 3 fold (no, you don’t get another entry, but I figured I’d beg).
5. Feel free to TWEET this (remember I am on twitter as the BigCajunMan (see the button below), and if I see you tweet this, I will add another entry in for you).
6. I hope shipping this isn’t too expensive (no it is not going to go Fed Ex or overnight, it will go via Canada Post).
7. If you are associated with Intuit or are married/related to me, you are not eligible to enter.

Contest will close on Tuesday February 23rd at Midnight.

My wife a couple of days ago took on the daunting task of creating a space for a gas fitter to come in and work on a new project in our house. Our back room in our basement was very cluttered and there was no way anyone could get anywhere safely, so she took on the task of attempt to clear a space in the chaos.

I came home and was very impressed with the work done and the amount that was being thrown out (although there still is a great deal to dispose of) in some industrial strength garbage bags. The area was swept and cleared so that the work could be done without fear of anyone breaking a leg attempt to scale “mount crap”.

My wife was not impressed when the workman finally showed up and was able to do all the work needed on the main floor of our house and went nowhere near the basement.

Was this a waste of time? NO! That kind of de-cluttering is a good thing for many reasons:

• Safety:that mess was going to injure someone, and could easily have been a fire hazard, so it needed to be lessened in magnitude.
• De-Clutter:the amount of crap that we were never going to use again (and things that should have been disposed of long ago) is now reduced by 9.75% now, which means we only have 90% of it still to clean up (but still a good start)
• Security issues:although it might be possible for an Al-Qaeda cell to hide out in that mess, I did not mean that exactly. We found a whole set of banking records for an organization my wife no longer works for, and those records have now been destroyed. That kind of security is very important.

Do you have a lot of old financial records hidden in the clutter of your “secret stash” (be it in your basement or in that closet you just never open)? Maybe it’s time to at least find all the old credit cards, banking cards, pass books, cheque books and bank agreements that you no longer need and destroy them. Leaving that kind of stuff around is just asking for problems later in life.

If you destroy it now, you know it no longer exists, if you simply “leave it”, do you know if there are records hanging around that can easily be used for identity theft? Maybe it’s time to go clean up a bit? Before you destroy those credit cards, make sure the accounts aren’t still active, as well.

Stats Canada posted some data that confirmed my guess that Canadians are generous when they donate to charities (one of the reasons I love living in this country).

The statistics show that there is a core of about 25% of folks who give most of the money, but also the most time to these charities, but on a whole, Canadians still are very generous folks (when they can).

Canadians donated a total of $10.0 billion in 2007, up from $8.9 billion in 2004. In 2007, the average donation was $437, compared with $400 in 2004. These increases were not adjusted for inflation.

The total amount of time volunteered through groups and organizations amounted to about 2.1 billion hours, which was equivalent to almost 1.1 million full-time jobs. On average, volunteers contributed 166 hours each.

That’s an important factor for folks to remember as well, that volunteering your time can be just as valuable to any organization. I give money to some charities and I give my time to organizations that want my help (and talents) as best I can (most of the time I have so much fun, I think I am the one getting the most out of the time).

Where does our time and money go?

Where do Canadians Give their Time and Money?

This graph lines up pretty much how I give, where my monetary givings are mostly to my Church whereas my time is given to Recreation activities.

More Interesting: Start Young

According to the survey, people were more likely to volunteer and donate to charities or non-profit organizations later in life if they had participated in a range of community or youth activities during their primary or secondary schooling.

These activities included participating in student government, a religious organization, a youth group such as girl guides or scouts, or an organized team sport.

This data is very useful, and topical for me, as my wife did a talk on the youth stewardship program at our Church and made that exact same point. You need to get kids and teens to understand WHY they should give, and that giving their talents (not just money) is an incredible gift they can give their community. Simply forcing kids to give won’t teach them the importance of the gift (and more likely those kids won’t give later in life either), get them to understand why, and they will gladly give when they are adults.

Warren Buffett does have an interesting turn of phrase, but that is the quote attributed to him, that the U.S. Economy has “… fallen off a cliff…” but he does think that things will be just fine (eventually).  I guess stating the obvious is the only thing left for pundits and commentators (and financial bloggers) can do.

Mr. Buffett’s statement, while correct, is a little like telling me that I can’t dunk a basketball any more (i.e. it’s painfully obvious that skill left me about 30 years ago (and even then it was a fleeting skill)).

Is there a bottom in sight?

Not this week is the guess I have, with the nay sayers and gloom and doomers out in full force, I suspect this week is going to be another bear week on the markets which just adds more gasoline to the already raging economic apocalypse bon fire. 

When to buy is the only question now, because so many stocks seem at bargain prices, but why buy now, if they are going to drop another 10%? You never do find out whether you made a good buy, until you actually sell the stock.

Just Don’t Look?

That is advice I have heard is if you feel confident in the stocks or indexes you hold, just don’t look, put the stock ticker down and simply wait for the recovery (whenever that may be). Given it is procrastination week, that might be a good idea, there is not much that can be done until a bottom is found, just wait for the bottom, buy some bargains and sit back again?

A friend is doing some number crunching trying to figure out which is the cheapest Cell Phone plan that she can get that fits her needs, so her and I have been discussing various pay per use plans (I know something about them because both my daughters have those set ups), I am not sure what her final decision was (I will post it when I know), but this caused me to look at my phone bills and I was flabbergasted to see just how much I pay per month for my phones.

The total this month is $190.00 (approx), for 1 home phone line (with a long distance package) and 2 cell phones all from Bell.

I leave that in a paragraph by itself because I am astounded at that number. That is more than I pay to heat my house and it is about 80% of what I pay in Electric + Natural Gas, this is ridiculous, and I am now banging my head on my desk realizing this is one of my major expenses every month.

I am getting nailed for the long distance plan on my home phone, but I am getting obliterated by long distance charges and text’ing charges on my cell phones. My wife and I save long distance charges by sending text message, however, evidently we send too darn many.

This is my new target for controlling costs, as this is a crazy expense. Anyone care to comment on their cell phone expenses and how they keep this expense down, I am open to suggestions (two tin cans and a piece of wire is one of my ideas right now).

Carnivals This Week

I am sending in posts to carnivals again so you can read some of my previous works at:

• The Carnival of Debt Reduction #141 has my post Debt Reduction is like Teenage Sex.
• The Carnival of Debt Management #53 has the same post up too.