Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Financial Hang Over?

How goes your holiday hang over? Did you make too merry over the holidays and need to lose some weight? Worse, did you overspend and now have some large credit card bills to pay? Now might be the time to figure out what went right and what might have gone wrong in your Christmas shopping and spending pursuits and maybe devise a plan not to repeat the same behavior this year (and a plan on how to dig out from under any debt issues you may have created from making so merry).

A plan for next year could start with a simple calculation like:

Amount Spent for last Christmas / 11 months  =  How much you should save for this year?

Simply buy savings bonds or GICs to save the money and you are ready, for next holidays.

Banks Returning from the Dead?

Glad to see TD and BMO both returning from the dead as it were. Their very low prices meant that during this DRiP cycle my dividends bought a lot more shares than normal, but that is a good thing in the long run.

Bank of Montreal

 
All a good thing for the long term.

My regular readers will remember last week I asked, “What is the Bottom in Stocks” and I pointed out we just will not know what the bottom is until six months afterwards, and I was proven right again yesterday, when I (eternal pessimist) thought there was no way things could drop any lower, yet they did. Canadian financial stocks (banks and financial folks) took a hell of a pounding again, and now I am not even sure why, but TD and BMO both took hits again. 

TD’s drop actually had a minuscule basis in fact as their Ameritrade division announced some fairly neutral numbers, but the whole TSX went “Financial Apocalypse” for the last 45 minutes of trading and a great deal of losses were incurred in that sure time frame (stock value losses I mean).

I keep wondering is this the bottom, but as I have said, we will only know in six months time.

Financial Impact on Me

My RRSP’s continue to drop in value (I haven’t looked really, but am glad it is Dividend time since my DRIPs (Dividend Reinvestment Plan) on most of my stocks will be kicking in and I will be buying some very cheap stock with it). I also continue to collect up old investment vehicles into a single set of investment devices, which are now fairly heavy in cash, which is a good thing, now the only question is when and what to buy, and I continue to “waffle” on what that decision might be.

E.I. Not For You

Got a call yesterday from a lady at the Employment Insurance office asking me a bunch of questions about my severance package and how it had been implemented. She was new on her job, so she and I fumbled around a few questions and I think it has been straightened out for now, but this did bring up an interesting point, which is that you MUST apply for E.I. when you are laid off, not when you think you need it. If you don’t apply right away, you may be disallowed your claim for taking too long to fill in the correct documentation.

At the end of the conversation the nice lady mentioned that I will not be eligible to get E.I. for about a year (the length of my severance package in their calculations). This didn’t surprise me, but I know for sure now that someone at the E.I. office has said it to me out loud.

Weather Bomb

Evidently Ottawa will be the victim of a Weather Bomb in the next day or so. Before you start thinking that the folks at Environment Canada have created a Weapon of Mass Destruction that will cause huge storms, that is not what the term means, it is a real Weather Forecaster term to describe a quick and large drop in the Barometric Pressure which is usually part of a severe storm system.

What does this have to do with Personal Finance? Everything!

• With 15-30 centimeters of snow coming Do You Have Your Snow Tires On? I don’t! If you live in Quebec, remember you need to have them on, it is the law now.
• Do you have enough food at home in case it is hard to get out in the next day or so?
• Is your furnace in good working order?
• What if the power goes off, have any wood in for your fireplace?
• Does your snow-blower work? Does it have any gas?

A busy week for me at work, which is always a good thing, so let’s just bounce around to some thoughts on my mind and some ideas.

1. Let me state that I am NOT in favor of the Government banning smoking in>some one’s house. I never meant to imply that should be the case, however, I am all over parents who ban smoking from their house (even their spouses) when there are kids involved. To paraphrase a famous (infamous) Canadian, The Government has no place in the bedrooms of Canadians (kind of creepy to think of my MP hanging out in my bedroom).
2. TD announces amazing profits yesterday after last week’s DOOM and GLOOM statements, so what does this mean? You should have bought TD last week? That’s about my only view on this, whether there are still more ramifications from the below prime fiasco in the states, we shall see. My DRIP keeps dripping along happily.
3. The back to school insanity continues in my financial world, with that sucking sound you hear my kids going back to school.
4. My visit to the Passport office this week was not the horror I expected, it took me 20 minutes once I was in the door and I paid only $2 parking at 240 Sparks Street, amazing. I didn’t see Lotta Hitchmanova anywhere around however. Just go after 9:00 AM on a Wednesday before the Lunch rush.
5. My company (my real job remember) just changed their parental leave benefits (naturally lowering it’s top up (was 75% after first 9 weeks are at full pay, now is only 55%) ), which has caused a great deal of discussion internally, with one side crying FOUL and the other pointing out that a great deal of companies do not offer any “top up” of the EI benefits and we are lucky to still have them. Given I am not planning on having any more kids, I am not part of the discussion.

In other areas my investments are not doing as well, but at least I can point to one area of happiness for me.

Always glad to see the mainstream media follows Stats Canada as well, as I saw my commentary about Salt has also made it onto the CBC web page (well from the same source at least). My nose for news is still good!

I also don’t feel quite so DUMB about my Arithmetic problems on my Credit Card after finding out that CERN blew up their Particle Accelerator, due to mathematical errors at Fermilab. Goes to show that everyone has problems with their calculations.