Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for the ‘Home Expenses’ Category

What do you do in a country where 200,000,000 need eye care yet most can’t afford it? This fascinating talk from Ted entitled How Low cost eye care can be world class outlines how this is being done in India.

India’s revolutionary Aravind Eye Care System has given sight to millions. Thulasiraj Ravilla looks at the ingenious approach that drives its treatment costs down and quality up, and why its methods should trigger a re-think of all human services.

As usual it starts with a driving force, and it expands, but eyesight is something that folks in North America just assume you go and get fixed (for most folks), but in India that is not the case.

The business side is interesting too, about the economy of scale that can be put on a problem, is this model possible in North America?

I guess I got on a bit of a rant on the concept of Chutzpah this week, so I will leave you with one more post on some of the things in my life that I view as chutzpah that I run into in the financial world of today:

• Bank Fees: An institution that used to simply make money by loaning your money to other folks and doing business in the greay area between loan rates and savings rates, now charges over $10 a month for the priviledge to put your money in their bank. You have heard my rants about Free Banking before, but the banking racquet has a corner on chutzpah, that is for sure.
• Credit Cards: after watching the PBS Front line special The Card Game, the entire Credit Card business is a shrine to Chutzpah. The Canadian Capitalist has a link to the special, well worth watching, but unmitigated temerity and complete contempt for your customers is so prevelant in the Credit Card world, it should be renamed the Screw You We Get Your Money Card business. The fact it still exists and is not very regulated, shows that Chutzpah works.
• Gas Prices in Canada: How gas prices are set in Canada is claimed to be by free market pressures, I disagree. To tell a consumer that gas that has been refined and delivered and sitting in holding tanks at your local gas station has gone up in price, due to International Shortages, is Chutzpah.
• Financial Bail Outs in the U.S.: that was gall, and chutzpah combined. TO have created the entire credit crisis via your own foolish (if not illegal) practices, and then going hat in hand to the government asking for Trillions of dollars to bail you out is chutzpah. You lose consumers money, through flawed methodologies, and then ask for more money from that consumer (through their taxes) to not lose more money? Staggering.

Anybody else wishing to chime in with their own private financial chutzpah examples, please feel free to comment!

Chutzpah?

For those of you who still don’t get the concept of chutzpah the best explanation I can find is from Leo Rostein (author of the Joys of Yiddish ), who stated:

“…that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.”

Now that is chutzpah!

So Michael James and Larry MacDonald both commented last week about Hospital and Medical clinics and their User Fees, and I was exposed to those and a few other interesting charges as well.

This past weekend I hung out in the Emergency room at CHEO (Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario), due to my daughter assuming that her knee can bend sideways (I guess I should be happy she didn’t try to bend it like a dog’s back leg like Napoleon MacCallum did in the NFL). The visit was long and I believe I have been exposed to most of the respiratory illnesses out there, however there was another interesting charge that came up.

Yes, I had to pay for parking which wasn’t cheap ($13 for 5 hours), however, the interesting charge that came up was the cost of having to buy crutches for my daughter (whether we really need these crutches remains to be seen). The crutches cost $30, and I had to pay with direct withdrawal or cash (no credit cards). The no credit cards part seemed quite odd, given not many people I know wander around with $30 cash in their wallets, but the fact that the Crutches only cost $30 was interesting.

The last time I got crutches, it wasn’t that much either (it was for me, I decided running fast and then placing my foot in a gopher hole and almost shattering my ankle might be fun), so are these aluminum crutches somehow subsidized? I think I can claim them on my insurance so I am not that worried, but I was more curious about whether these were somehow subsidized, or are crutches just that cheap? Anyone know?

Whether any of the odd bacteria/viruses I was exposed to take hold in my body, remains to be seen.

For my regular readers, I am so lazy swamped over the holidays that I am taking some time off and putting up a “Best of” anthology until the New Year (January 4th to be exact). Enjoy two Best of posts a day over the Holidays and have yourself a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

The year ticks down, I trust you have completed all of your essential end of year stuff, and yes here is some other interesting things to think about too!

Eating Your Own Dog Food (2009/06/30)

Interesting turn of phrase I have seen used to mean a few different ideas in the software development world and in a few other places as well……

Click here for the complete Post

Don’t Buy the Model Home  (2009/03/18)

I was chatting with my fellow financial bloggers a few days ago and mentioned to Larry MacDonald about how I had purchased one of the model homes in my area and the issues I had run into having done this and he encouraged me to expand on this for a post here….

Click here for the Complete Post

Registered Disability Savings Plan(2009/11/04)

This relatively new savings vehicle introduced by the Government a while ago, has been taking a while to appear as a Savings Vehicle in many of the banks. I have been checking with TD for a while, but they have finally come out with their version of the RDSP . …….

Click here for the complete post

As part of my every day life, I help out at my Church with the computers (remember volunteering is a good thing to do), and one of the weekly events that should happen is back up of the computers at the Church (as it should for all of us, are you doing backups?). For the longest of times I used a CD-RW (read write CD) to back up this data, but over time the data set grew, and eventually we had to use 2 CD’s to accomplish the task.

The Problem changed when we got a new system for the church that came with a DVD burner and suddenly we were able to back up much more data onto One DVD-RW (holds about 7 CD’s worth of data, uncompressed), thus the problem changed, so we adapted the answer to that change.

This past little while the DVD burner has gone “on the fritz” (my term for being broken and I can’t figure out why), so I have been unable to do these backups, which frustrated me to no end. On the way home from a fruitless repair attempt it dawned on me that maybe the problem has changed again?

The price of USB memory keys has dropped dramatically lately, to the point where now, I can purchase a 4 GB USB device for about $12, so instead of attempting to fix the DVD burner issue, I simply have changed the problem, and will now do backups to USB devices instead, thus making it faster and easier to store (securely and safely).

A side note, remember that backups are very important, but RESTORE is the most important capability, so you need to test your backup sets are readable and usable occasionally too (don’t wait until you MUST have the backups to find out whether your backups are unusable).

So What?

What does this have to do with Personal Finances? Some of us sometimes become enamored with the solution we have put in place for a specific Personal Finance issue, examples would be:

• Putting money on RRSP dutifully monthly, and only paying normal Mortgage payments, when in fact you may already have a Pension at work?
• Making over payments on our Mortgage while still carrying balances on Credit Cards.
• Paying for Banking Services or fees when we can get it for free elsewhere.

These are examples of solutions to problems that may have (or may in the future), change and you may need to rethink your response (because it is an answer to a problem no longer in play).

Stay on your toes and keep asking “why am I doing this”, when it comes to your finances, and in life as well, becuase you might find a better way, if you re-think the problem you are solving.