Canadian Personal Finance Blog

And not a little drop in the value of building permits a sharp drop of 12% below last year’s average (look at the graph!), holy cow! What does this mean? Well, February is also a cold month, so there might be a seasonal portion to that drop, but it might mean that the house building market is starting to cool a little, but then again, one month does not a trend make, either. Does this mean the stop of the strong growth we have seen? For this month at least, but what does this summer have to offer? We shall have to see!On the positive side of things, Employment is up again month over month by almost 55,000 jobs, which is good news. Thanks to fun with numbers the actual unemployment rate remained unchanged at 6.1% . Being the father of daughters I was glad to see that most of the new jobs created in March went to women, good for you ladies! Most of the new jobs are coming in the “Service Sector” for this past month as well, and if you want to find a job, I guess B.C. is the place to be, where they have record low unemployment rate. Of course, you’d have to find somewhere to live as well, and that is not cheap out there, so keep that in mind.

On the Carnival side of things, my posting about Zen and the art of Financial Planning is mentioned in the Carnival of Debt Management #7 hosted by Getting Green. Go have a look at some of the other excellent posts.I got an interesting comment on my How Not To Make Money on the Internet blog, which said that the comments on this site if viewed with Mozilla come up as 24 point? Holy cow! I’ll have to check that (I usually check using Firefox and IE, yet another tool to test with).

I will be celebrating Easter this weekend, so there most likely won’t be a lot (if any) posts this weekend. Enjoy the peace and New Hope of Easter with your families.

Lent is slowly coming to a close (but remember it ends Sunrise Easter Sunday, in case you were wondering). Has it been the experience you wanted spiritually and/or financially? Why or why not? If not, maybe write the major reason why it didn’t work, but also make a list of things that did work during your Lenten devotions.

If you were trying to save as much money as possible, and did manage to cut out buying coffee at work, but then had to replace the muffler on your car, that’s ok! You controlled what you could control, sometimes things just come up, no point in beating yourself up.

Enjoy this Sunday, relax, and know that Easter is coming soon.

So how goes your Lenten journey both spiritually and financially? Things will soon wrap up with Palm Sunday and finally Easter weekend. I look forward to Easter week, just because it allows me to “reconnect” with my Church and Faith.

Financially how has your plans gone? Mine has not been as good as my spiritual ones, but hope springs eternal. I will start anew today and see if I can get the financial plan back on track and aim again at my financial goals for Lent and for 2007.

A small slip or a big one, does not mean the journey is over, just that you need to maybe restart it, that is all, don’t give up, redouble your efforts!

Go on over and check out FMF as well, he has his usual good Sunday postings, including a very good one on The Bible’s Views on Borrowing –C8j