Canadian Personal Finance Blog

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.

Debt Reduction is like Sex in your teenage years, everybody wanted to do it, but almost none were skilled at it, and very few actually did it, and worse still, nobody dared tell you how to do it.

Do I have your attention now? Think about it, I am right and for all you folks who are taken aback or think this is a crass statement, so be it, but you know it’s true.

Debt reduction is a subject few people bring up, especially the ones that need to be helped the most, because they don’t want to appear they don’t know what they are doing, or worse that they appear as stupid to other people as the way they feel inside.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help, and don’t be afraid to talk to people you trust about what they do about this problem. Let’s take Debt Reduction out of the closets and bathrooms and into the bright light of the day!

Come to Canada, PLEASE!!!

Tourism is taking an almighty beating these days thanks to the strength of the Loonie, according to Stats Canada.

Travel to Canada hit a record low for the fifth consecutive month in March, in the wake of substantial declines in both same-day car trips from the United States and the number of visitors from overseas nations.

Tourism is an important industry in Canada, so don’t discount the importance of this decline.

Gone in 15 Minutes

That was how long it took our old Bar B Q to disappear last night when I put it out for the garbage at 7:10 PM, 15 minutes. The quest for de-crapification continues with gusto with a great deal of yard waste and most of the metal frame from a sofa bed going out in the garbage last night as well (I had cut it up with my reciprocating saw).

First a scavenger arrived and took the top and left a whole bunch of stuff, and I was quite irate that I was now left with a mass of crap strewn on my front lawn. I went out and tidied it up a bit, and went back inside, 10 minutes later it was all gone, except for the bar b q rocks, which remained in the garbage, where I had thrown them. The second scavenger had taken everything and also part of the sofa bed that I had cut up to put out for the trash (also metal), it was all gone, in 15 minutes total. Not sure what they wanted it for, but I feel foolish having bent two cutting blades cutting up the bed frame, if someone was going to take it all.

There is more room in the garage, but still more still to throw out.

Our friends in Stats Canada put out yet another interesting article yesterday comparing the income of Canadians and specifically Canadian families. Being a member of a Canadian family as usual I find the numbers fascinating (but I do have a Math degree as well, so I will try to temper my enthusiasm).

The Data in this survey seems to center around the Median Income numbers for the groups in question. If we ask our friends at Wikipedia they remind us:

The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one.

Keeping that in mind (this is not the AVERAGE income but the value in the middle of the entire sample), there are some interesting facts to be seen.

Our friends at Stats Canada Point out:

Families had an estimated median income after taxes of $58,300 in 2006, up 2.1% from 2005 in real terms. It was the third consecutive annual increase. In 2006, the increase was mainly the result of gains in both market income and government transfers.

Now that is ALL families (a very large sample given it includes groups of two people or more), in the Two parents with Children category (where I live) income was up from $74,200 to $74,900 which isn’t bad (ok it’s better than it going down), which is a 0.93% increase. Inflation at that time was somewhere around 2.0% (I am guessing don’t have the exact numbers) so that means the Median families were losing ground.

Interesting statistics to look over and decypher.

Any other comments?