Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Gas Prices and Inflation

With gas prices dropping back to only ludicrously expensive level, what is this going to mean for the Consumer Price Index? The spike jumping from 90 cents a litre to $1.35 a liter is still sifting through the pricing world, and now we are back to $1.20 a liter? This is going to be an interesting few months that is for sure, and I am not sure I am going to completely understand the CPI numbers either (coming out this Wednesday). I know that my family is most certainly not driving our Van as much as we used to and are driving my Carolla a great deal more.

More Cents Not to Work?

Like the punny title? It’s an interesting quandary my family has currently, which is, my wife has been working a volunteer job, that she has enjoyed over the past few years. They are now formalizing this position and are putting out a tender to fill this position, and they want my wife to apply for the job, but here are a few of the points that we must take into consideration:

1. The job is about 10 hours a week which would pay about twice minimum wage, so not a huge amount of money.
2. If my wife cannot find a nursery school to put my 3 year old son in (we were planning on doing this any how) we may have to find day care to cover this job.
3. This may be just enough money to make my wife NOT a tax deduction on my taxes (thus I lose the $1200 worth of rebates I would get if she had no income).
4. If (3) is true then her income effectively is taxed at my rate (if you think about it)
5. They are asking for a 3 year commitment
6. She’d have to do some driving for this job too, which is now much more expensive.

Points (3) & (4) are the ones that have me not so sure that it makes any sense for her to take this job. If (2) cannot come to pass, then the job is out, because I am not paying for day care for a part time job (this is not Quebec where we can get a $10 a day daycare spot).

An interesting quandary, which I will keep my gentle readers posted on, but I am curious to hear any opinions about this kind of issue.

My wife and I have fallen into the daily trip to the grocery store trap (very dangerous, because you just never figure out how much you are spending until you do your Quarterly Financial Report).

We came up with an idea, that I am pretty sure we can’t live up to, but I throw it out to the folks who might also have fallen into this gas wasting, and money wasting trap.

Premise: You are spending too much money going to shop every day for groceries, and you are wasting gas doing the trip every single day.

Walk !

Yup, if you are going to go to the grocery store every day, you must walk there ( we will accept cycling there or taking the bus, if you have a bus pass). I will allow for if you go shopping on the weekends, you can drive 1 day, to pick up a “weekly order“, however all other times you must walk.

Why walking? Am I some kind of Physical Fitness Wacko? Nope, but let me be more precise:

Benefits

1. Exercise (yes, you, the one that is eating that second donut, I mean you). For me the walk is about 1.5 km each way, maybe, I tried it out today, and it is about a 55 minute round trip proposal. Exercise tends to help your appetite get under control as well.
2. You will only buy what you can carry home with you. If you are taking the bus, you might want to put some kind of limitation on this, but if you are walking, you aren’t as likely to over buy, because, you know how much you can carry all the way back home.
3. There will be days where you go, “We don’t need fennel that much”, and not buy it that day. You will then not buy the donuts, and/or other things that you might impulse buy too.
4. You save money on the gas, and right now, that is not chump change either. If you cut out 5 trips a week? Over the year that could add up to some serious money.
5. If you go with your wife, it gives you time to walk and talk without the kids around too!

Flaws

1. It’s pouring, and you just ran out of milk for your toddler, because the teenage locusts drank it all.  (sorry dear, the big cajun wife is driving)
2. You need your meds and have run out of your prescription (no plan of this kind should be life threatening). Go get your meds, you are allowed to take your car!
3. The walk to your grocery store is over 5 Km (one way), then I guess it’s ok, but my bet is, you don’t shop every day if that is the case as well!

As I said, me and Mrs. C8j may try this out, we did on Monday, and it was quite nice, but I was on vacation that day as well.

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.

… how do you know it ever happened? I remember reading that in a Tom Clancy novel and thinking that really does make a lot of sense, and it is very important in Financial Planning. If you have a plan, but you don’t write it down, can you be sure you are following the plan? How do you explain the plan to your spouse if you have not written it down?

If you don’t write down the cheques you write and the credit card purchases you had, how can you tell if one arrives that you don’t remember is fraudulent or not? If you write it down, you at least have an argument about whether it is real or not.

Records keeping is synonymous with Financial Planning and Financial Reporting and is an also an important of your home finances, and you must keep diligent records, as well.

This came across my mind when I revisited my mortgage repayment spreadsheet, which I use to figure out just how much longer I have to pay off my house (not as short as I want it to be), but at least because I wrote it down, I now know how long it should be, if I can live within my financial plan. Without that being written down, all I have is, “Maybe some day I’ll have my house paid off”, but to me that is not enough, if I don’t have a real number in my head, I don’t have a goal, and without a goal, it is unlikely I will succeed.

Tomorrow, I’ll do a quick run down of how to set up a simple mortgage repayment spreadsheet, which is a good estimator of how many days you have left to pay off your house.