Canadian Personal Finance Blog

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.

Back in 2005 just when I was starting to blog, I never really knew what I was going to write about (nothing much has changed), so I wrote about the system I put in place to ensure that my kids got their allowances.

As a follow on to the story my oldest child is now 18, so I no longer will be allowed to directly access her bank account any more (something to keep in mind).

Real World Example: Kids Allowances

OK, so back to what this blog is about, real world financial ranting.
For the longest time my wife and I tried to get the kids on an allowance, so that they could learn what money is, how it works and some responsibility, but inevitably, we’d forget for a couple of weeks, try to catch up and eventually just gave up (much to the kids chagrin). Interesting, we were trying to teach the kids responsibility and all it did was show how irresponsible their parents were (now THAT is ironic).

About 6 years ago I was in the TD on one of my yearly visits, getting my bank fees waived for a year, and get them to fix something they had screwed up (I think it was my mortgage that year), when I asked about kids’ bank accounts. My brother sends the girls money every year, and we had got to the point where we didn’t want to just buy them toys with it. The poor woman who’s life I was ruining for the day, said the accounts could be opened then (since the kids had SIN numbers), and the accounts would show up “under” my account on my on line banking.

A day or two later, a light went on in my head. I called the bank on the phone lady (who I now call once a year, because I do most of my banking on line, but couldn’t figure out how to do what I wanted). I asked her to set up weekly transfers from my account to my kids accounts, thus assuring that the money was paid every week (whether I remembered or not).

Well, it has worked, the kids get their weekly allowances AND they actually do things like:

• Buy clothes that they really want
• Have somewhere to put their uncle’s money and can then buy what they want
• Buy presents for their friends birthdays (that one shocked me the first time it happened).

So it seems this experiment has worked, chalk one up for me.