Canadian Personal Finance Blog

My wife went to Home Depot to replace the Bar B Q mentioned in my humorous story of a few weeks back (Flames and Bar B Q), she found the one she wanted and was going to come home and get my Home Depot card to purchase it (not sure why it is in my name only, but it is for some reason).

The wiley sales rep at the Home Depot stopped her and said, “We have a deal this month, if you get a new Home Depot Card, you get $30 off on this purchase…”. My wife was intrigued by this, as she does enjoy saving money, so she asked how she could get a credit card, and the sales rep went to the service desk and sure enough, my wife qualified for a Home Depot Card. My wife does have a part time job working, but does not really make enough herself to justify giving her a credit card (in my humble opinion).

The Sales Rep was undaunted and he managed to get my wife a Home Depot Credit Card, and when he asked my wife how large a credit limit she wanted, she said the minimum (sensible lady). So now my family has two Home Depot credit cards, one in each my wife and my name.

Are they separate? I have no idea, I haven’t seen my wife’s bill yet, but it astounds me that it was that easy for my wife to get a credit card, and now I am petrified that one of my kids could do the exact same thing. Are these credit agencies looking at my credit rating to give this out? Not likely, but you never know, it is just that they will give a credit card out hoping to trap anyone into carrying debt on it (the interest rate on Home Depot cards is well over 16% I believe).

I guess our next task is to go back to Home Depot and close my wife (or my) account, we shall see. Sounds like something out of “Max’ed Out”.

Last year, we bought a shredder because I kept taking stuff to shred to work, and felt I had enough stuff that appears in my house that I do not want to leave my house in the garbage where anyone might look at it, and I also enjoying destroying things.

What kind of things do I enjoy running through my shredder?

• Most of the credit cards I have keep sending me “cheques” that I can use to make cash withdrawals and get charge 20% interest from the moment the cheque is cashed. These things have on them my credit card number on it, and thus if someone got a hold of it in tact, I would be in very deep trouble. They shred very nicely.
• Credit Cards that I do not use, I have a bunch of credit cards that I do not use, that I am going to cancel, but I have already shredded them. They shred very nicely indeed.
• I also shred many old financial documents that I don’t need to keep, don’t want to burn and don’t want to leave out in my garbage either.
• Canceled cheques and the like as well.
• Old pay stubs.

I put my shredder in the same class as my safety deposit box as being something important in my Financial Planning, an important aspect of safety and security in finances.

New Housing Prices Still Rising

Just not as fast, and it’s acceleration is dropping. This means if you are buying a new house and you waited from last year it is going to cost more, it’s just not getting as expensive, as quickly.

Year-over-year growth in new housing prices slowed for a second consecutive month in March. This deceleration continues a downward trend that started in September 2006, due mainly to the softening market in Alberta.

Contractors’ selling prices rose 6.1% between March 2007 and March 2008, a slightly slower pace than the 6.2% year-over-year increase posted in February 2008.
(…)
Elsewhere in Ontario, contractors’ selling prices were 4.5% higher in Toronto and 3.1% higher in Ottawa–Gatineau compared with March 2007.

Personal Finance Update

So my attempts at stopping my spending at work begins anew. No spending over the last few days and that is a good beginning. De-Crapification continues as well, with more crap to go very soon.

Started reading Fark again and tripped across some business stories from the main stream media that made my stomach turn (haven’t had a good rant lately). Why isn’t the entire financial world imploding into a black hole is my only question?

British Import I Hope Not to See

So there is a “Money Card” that is branded as a Visa card in the U.K. that ends up charging up to 365% interest on balances. Doorstep lending, gives you this card with a positive balance of 300 pounds sterling, which you then can use to purchase things, however, the balance is actually a loan, and you must pay it off before you can use the card after you have used up it’s balance. If you pay back sooner, you pay more in interest, which is astounding to me.

Naturally this isn’t a card a person with a good credit rating could use, instead, this is marketed and aimed at those who cannot get a credit card, and thus are less likely to complain about this new usury rates (also less likely to pay it back would be my guess as well).

If this kind of stuff is going on in Canada, I really hope the government steps in to stop it. Loan Sharking used to be a crime, guess now it is just “Good Business Practice”?

Less Foreclosures in the U.S. ?

Well not really, what is actually happening is that the banks are so overwhelmed with folks not paying their mortgages on time, that they have started to look the other way. Evidently folks are simply staying in their house and seeing if anyone is going to kick them out, which evidently isn’t happening as fast as you would think?

I get the feeling this whole “low interest scam” thing is just not going to go away, and may be a much deeper pit than I thought it was.

When In Doubt Change the Rules

One of my favorite lines from a movie was, “Just when you thought you understood the game, we CHANGED THE RULES!!!“, and that statement seems to be true in the world of Financial Institutions as well. This article from the Seattle Times, implies that the Washington Mutual bonus system which previously relied on things like profitability and such, are now being re-vectored, due to the company’s problems in the area of foreclosusures and such.

Let me quote directly:

However, its 2008 bonus plan for about 3,000 top employees specifically excludes the effects of bad-loan set-asides, foreclosures and restructuring costs from the financial criteria used to judge the executives.

Instead, in addition to measures such as operating income, bank fees and “customer loyalty,” the compensation committee will subjectively evaluate “how well our executive management team addressed the challenges in the housing, mortgage and credit markets and the impact of those challenges on our financial results.”

That seems fair, if this information is factual.