Canadian Personal Finance Blog

As I have said, as part of my financial clean up for my severance package I must go to my bank and attempt to get them to actually help me, and possibly earn their exorbitant fees (although after reading on Nancy Zimmerman’s blog about the Citizen’s Bank, maybe I need to reconsider who I bank with).

RESPs How Do You Withdraw Money?

This question continues to confound me on the TD web site.  I know I need to do an Educational Assistance Payment from the RESP, so that I can take advantage of the CESG payments made by the government. It is simple to pay money into the RESP, but extracting money from the RESP is a much more interesting thing to do, so I must now figure out how this works, and will have to fill in a bunch of forms.

Locked In Retirement Account (LIRA)

Given I will be extracting funds from my pension, it must go into a locked in retirement account, so I must now find out about how TD Canada Trust does this kind of account. I have one with SUN Life, which is of no bloody use to me (so it will be folded into whatever I create for this side of things). Hopefully this is a self-directed type investment creature and I can take advantage of one of the Lazy Portfolios that the Canadian Capitalist has spoken of previously.

RRSP For Me

As I have said previously most of my RRSP money is in spousal RRSP’s, because I thought I was going to have a nice pension (silly me), but now I have a bunch of devices that I was collecting at work that I must now transfer over to a single RRSP in my name. 

No Fee Banking

I am paying $12.95 a month again for my banking, so I will be pointing out what the Citizen’s bank has to offer, and what PC Financial offers as well, and how I’d like to have free banking again, given all the business I will be bringing with me. Not sure if I will get it given to me this time, but we shall see, this time.

I look forward to the 4 hours I will have to spend at the bank.

With my oldest going off to University her back to school needs are a little more diverse than when she was simply returning to middle school or high school. Now she is in need of more things than just the ordinary:

• Pens
• Papers
• Binders
• Clothing

Now her back to school purchases have more diverse things added like:

• Her own computer
  • A copy of Microsoft Office
  • A printer
  • Anti-Virus software
  • A power bar
• Bed linens and towels
• A return ticket for Thanksgiving
• Living Expenses
• A desk lamp
• A stapler
• A 3 hole punch
• A year’s supply of the necessities of life
  • Shampoo
  • Deoderant
  • Laundry Detergent
  • Toothpaste
  • Soap

The life’s necessities is an interesting one, it’s not like Waterloo is like Baffin Island, where they only get supplies once a year, so I am not sure why we are buying so much of this stuff, but we are (and transporting it there too).

More School Spending

Of course we have regular back to school shopping for my other two daughters, and luckily my son has not reached the magic school age, but as I have said before September is a month with many very LARGE outputs of money, in many hidden places:

• Fees for courses and such, at a public school?
• Fees for sports
• Bus passes (this year only two, so I am saving there?!?!?)
• Clothing for back to school
• Basketball shoes and sports paraphenalia
• Field trip fees
• Registration for club sports

How much could all of this cost? Try well over $1000 with the sports fees and such added in!

All of this, as my last pay cheque will arrive on September 30th? Sounds like we are going to need a budget, oh Gail Vaz-Oxlade, where are your mason jars?!!!!!

Have a good weekend all, think I’ll be figuring out how many kidneys I can sell on E-bay…

Sorry for the aliteration, it’s the Sports Broadcaster inside me wanting to get out.

A few weeks back I told the story of The Worst Financial Advice I ever Gave, where I told you about inadvertantly sending a friend off to buy a timeshare condominium (honestly that was not my plan), and after getting some good feedback, I challenged some of my financial bloggers to do the same and the responses were quite interesting.

Carnival of Catastrophic Financial Advice #1

The responses I got were many and varied, but let’s wander through them:

• Larry MacDonald wrote in to say:
  I’ve been holding off giving you a story hoping a incident as humurous (sic) as yours would surface in my memory but so far drawing a blank. All I can think of to this point is visiting my dentist while I was writing my book on Nortel Networks (in early 2000 just as Nortel stock was at its peak),and having read many bullish articles and reports as part of my research, recommend he load up on Nortel. As the crash unfolded and the stock languished in following years, my dental bills seemed to get bigger and bigger every year.
  
• The Canadian Capitalist added in:
  When I first started investing, I read a lot of books (regrettably none from the recommended list) but for some reason, I was most attracted by the Motley Fool books. I mean, if guys wearing joker hats are making a killing on Iomega and writing books about how easy pickings can be had in the stock market, really how hard can this investing thing be?  …. Canadian Capitalist Worst Financial Advice Ever
• The Canadian Money review came up with a group of points where he felt he was not giving the best advice. One great point was: 
  Giving stock advice taken from a newsletter to friends and family without proper disclaimer that this was still risky!…  Canadian Money Review Worst Financial Advice Ever
  
• Michael James on Money commented that he doesn’t give bad advice, but he has had his advice interpreted incorrectly. He did comment:
  The truth is that while I have opinions on just about every financial subject, I don’t advise people directly very often. For example, although I often say that trading stock options is a very bad idea for most people, it could be right for a particular person … Michael James Worst Financial Advice Ever
  
• Loonies and Sense also wrote of their experiences, including this excerpt:
  “Lots of people are in debt; it’s normal.” - The sad thing about this one is that it’s not untrue. Still, justifying my situation to myself in this way really showed a lack of maturity and ambition. Now that I’ve set a goal to get out of debt, I feel like I’m expecting more of myself, and that encourages me to rise to the task.  … Loonies and Sense Worst Financial Advice Ever
  
• Nerd Money had an experience where his good advice wasn’t followed:
  I usually try to give information to anyone who asks a question. To the best of my ability I’ll explain what I know and then send them away telling them that they need to understand for themselves.
  … Nerd Money Worst Financial Advice Ever
• Monty Loree, sent the following: I don’t generally give out financial advice unless I’m pretty sure about it. I have given information that I knew that was right, however wasn’t backed up by the industry. One that comes to mind is when I talk about not having to deal with collection agencies.
  The truth is: There is no law that says you have to deal with a collection agency.  You have to deal with them by contractual agreement only.The reality is: it seems that the collection industry will just keep calling regardless of if they have contracts in place or not.  Collection agencies don’t receive any heat from the regulators as this is a creditor friendly legal system.On the one side, I wish I never mentioned this to people as it gives them false hope.
  On the other side, it’s the truth and I wish collection agencies would heed it.As I was developing my credit repair business, there were a lot of truths that came out.  Many of them were not accepted as the industry had been operating for so long outside of the guidelines that I uncovered.  Regulators are slow to move again as it’s a creditor friendly legal system.  The legal systems favor creditors over debtors.

Have a great long weekend for my readers in Ontario.

I get hundreds of spam and phishing e-mails at work, and for the e-mail account I use for this blog I get thousands of offers, spam, and phishing e-mails, and I have seen pretty much every one that has been sent (although I still wonder why only my girlfriend worries about the size of my penis, but that is for another post), so someone ignoring an e-mail normally wouldn’t cause me to write a post about it, but, sometimes there is an e-mail you should do something about.

My oldest, who is going to University in the fall got an e-mail last week, that she didn’t act on, and it may end up costing me (potentially) a large sum of money.

What Teenager Doesn’t Check Their E-mail?

That’s a darn good question, and the cost of it, is about 1/2 the cost of lodgings at University next year (and more) from what I can estimate, thanks to one of my children not checking her e-mail in the past 2 weeks or so (or at least not checking this e-mail in specific).

Evidently the University she is planning to attend this fall (if she passes all of her courses in high school) has a large 1st year class arriving in this coming academic year, so the residence board is worried they will not have enough rooms for all of the students who might want to live in Residence, thus they have devised a brilliant plan (IMHO) to deal with this.

One of their existing residence building has fairly large single rooms, so what the school will be doing is putting Bunk Beds into these larger rooms so two students can sleep and live where one would have been previously, which should help alleviate some of the over crowding problem.

The University’s housing folks are smart enough that they could simply force this on to their incoming first year students but that might cause some hard feelings, so instead they turned this problem into an opportunity so they devised a deal to make this an attractive choice, instead of a stop gap fix to their over crowding problem. The solution is ingenious, they sent out an e-mail to students going into first year that made the following offer:

1. Any first year student who volunteers for one of these bunk bed rooms, would only have to pay 1/2 of the normal residence lodging fees (excluding food). That in itself makes it a very attractive deal, but they weren’t finished.
2. In addition any student who is in one of these rooms, gets a free laptop computer and the residence will be set up with wireless Internet, due to the rooms being crowded and maybe not having enough space to study or work. There will be study areas set up to allow for these students to have  a work place somewhere near their rooms.

Great deal, don’t you think? I thought so when my oldest told my wife and I about it on Monday night, after my daughter finally checked her e-mail, however, the deal had been sent out on the previous Thursday and evidently by Friday morning all the spots and volunteers needed had been filled, so we missed out on this deal.

Did we really lose all that money? Not really, but it does go to show that sometimes you should check your e-mail a little more often than once every 2 weeks or so. Lessons we learn in life are never easy, and they always seem to have a large monetary value of some kind, unfortunately.