Canadian Personal Finance Blog

To quote my favorite basketball guy Dick Vitale. Yup Count Jim Flaherty (AOOOHHHH!!! Those Halowe’en tax cuts are scary kids), will bring out his ghouls and announce, what? Some of the ideas put forward:

• Cut the GST to 5%, which is great, now if Ontario would do the same, I’d be delirious, but some are not fond of changing CONSUMPTION taxes.
• Move the middle income tax bracket up a little higher, thus cutting taxes by about $700, which is good too.
• They could raise the minimum income tax threshold higher too, but no one thinks that.

Canadian Dollar Too Strong

How will Canada deal with the MIGHTY Canadian Loonie? It sits poised to break the $1.05 US threshold, and what will that do to this hot economy of ours? Not sure, yes it is going to hurt manufacturing jobs, but is it as bad as we are hearing? I guess we’ll only know looking back in hindsight.

Cheaper Computer parts

The Computer Price Index for parts is down 1.4% from July to August, which again astounds me. I thought that prices would flatten, but they continue to plummet. How does anybody make any money in this business?

In August, the index for commercial computers decreased 1.4% from July to 34.2 (2001=100). The index for consumer computers also declined, down 1.4% to 14.1.

We are Eating Out More

At least that is what Taverns and Restaurants are seeing:

Total estimated sales of the restaurants, caterers and taverns industry reached $3.7 billion in August, a 3.1 % increase over August 2006. (Data are neither seasonally adjusted, nor adjusted for inflation.)

The increase in sales, at the national level was due to higher sales at full-service restaurants (+3.4%). Sales for limited-service restaurants increased 2.0%. These two sectors accounted for more than 87% of the industry’s sales in August. The food service contractors sector also posted an increase (+6.4%). That sector accounted for almost 5% of the industry’s sales in August.

We are eating out more? Sounds like a booming economy to me.

Computer Perils

So the cogitations and expletives that have been expounded by me in the past few days have been due to my computer being sick. The hard drive crashed yesterday, but luckily not too badly. I will now spend a day or two cleaning up my system, due to my pack rat software installations.

What does this have to do with Financial Planning? I run Quicken on this machine and I have most of my excel workbooks for finance here as well. If this computer had died with no back up, I would have been SUNK. When was the last time you backed up your computer(s)? If you are doing anything on line for your financial well being, you might want to think about that one.

Long Term Mortgage Rates Going Up

If you haven’t locked in long term, it is going to cost you more today to get a long term Mortgage. Most of the major banks are guessing that interest rates will go up in the long term, so they are raising their long term rates to hedge against this. Long term bond yields have been up, and inflation is still above what the bank of Canada wants, so they may be right.

A Sea of Red

No, not my finances, the Liberals rolled to power again in Ontario. What does this mean? Well I think it means John Tory is as much a success running the Provincial PC Party as he was CFL Commizar. Four more years of Mr. McGuinty, wonder if he’ll start off his new term the way he did the last one (with a massive Tax increase)?

How much for a new house?

Well if you don’t live on the Prairies, your new house price is slowing a great deal, however, if you do live on the prairies, that is another story. Where I live the increase is less than inflation, so that is cool, but in Saskatoon, over 50%?!? Holy crap!

I always find Vacations very confusing in terms of never getting completely relaxed and then returning to a fire storm of activity at work, but vacations are important I think.

I have been ignoring Stats Canada for a while so here are some interesting points from our amigos in the land of statistics:

• Commercial Computers price index dropped again in June by 0.6% from May, which is great to see, and it still astounds me that computers continue to decrease in price, but I think I need to investigate this index more as to how they are doing their comparison. Given Apple’s drop in price of the iPhone, when is the best time to buy a computer or new piece of technology?
• There is a growing business for the government in the area of Tourism? Odd topic, but evidently the income that the government attributes to Tourism (taxes on travelers and paid by tourists) has been increasing from 2000 to 2006, which is interesting.
  

  The study found that tourism accounted for 3.9% of government revenue in 2006. This reflected the relatively high taxes on many goods and services bought by tourists, such as fuel, alcohol, and entertainment in casinos. At the same time, tourism accounted for 3.8% of all jobs in the economy and 2.0% of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP).

  Interesting to know that the government makes direct income from Tourism.

• Unemployment continues to be at historically low levels, which again is a nice thing to see. Construction is the big employment boom these days, but more older folks are getting jobs as well.
  

  In August, almost all of the employment growth for adult men and women came from those aged 55 and over. An estimated 34,000 older workers found employment in August. Since the beginning of this year, employment among the 55 and over age group has increased by 4.6%, the fastest pace of all age groups, with stronger growth for women (+5.5%) than men (+3.9%). The August employment rate for older men was its highest since 1985; the rate for older women was near the all-time high set in April of this year.

  We are working later in life? I think we have talked about that before.

Is the Canadian Economy overheating? Hard to tell, but we are living in previously unseen times, so that might be a hint that things might be too good to be true?