Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Yes, it is Mother’s Day, a day to celebrate our Mother’s and the good works of all Mother’s that we know. My mom’s works always amazed me growing up, and now my wife’s tireless works amaze me even more (and make me appreciate the hard work all Mothers do day in and day out).

Every year usually there is a survey that says, if Mothers were actually paid for their duties they would earn $X, and this year is no exception. This year’s value says mothers should be paid $126,593.00 according to Salary.com . Given the hours Mothers work that isn’t as big a salary as you might get (working 12-14 hours a day 7 days a week), and my bigger concern is who pays that? I can’t afford to have a Mother on my payroll if I had to pay that much! Guess, I’d have to get a second job, to pay.

“But they should try cleaning their house with little kids running around and messing it up right after them.”

The salary calculation for mothers also took into account the roles they fulfill as laundry machine operators, computer operators, facilities managers, van drivers and janitors. With overtime work averaging about 54.4 hours a week, stay-at-home mothers worked a hefty 94.4 hour work week.

Points well taken and well understood by most Fathers as well.

If a Mother works in the home her entire life, she gets CPP at the end of it, but not much else either, so the job has lousy benefits too.

Another interesting point about Mother’s Day is it used to be the day when the most long distance phone calls were made (according to AT&T in the U.S.), however Father’s Day was the day the most COLLECT phone calls were made, which sums it all up nicely.

One of the things I have learned over the years is that if you drive on your snow tires for too long in the spring (or say over an entire summer), your snow tires degrade very quickly during that time, and they soon become useless if you are not careful. It is a hard balance to figure out when you should remove your snow tires in the spring (in Ottawa, in the Sault or places north, I am sure this isn’t even being discussed yet). I called my mechanic and he is inundated with folks wanting their snow tires off and their summer tires back on, so I know that I am at least part of the crowd.

When I was younger one year, I figured I’d save myself some money because I needed to get NEW summer tires but my winter tires were relatively new, so I decided to stay on the winter tires all summer, for my troubles I ended up with:

1. Bad gas mileage
2. Badly worn snow tires (that had 1 season left in them after that summer, and they didn’t really do that well that 1 season either)
3. A noisy car all summer (snow tires on clear pavement are noisier)

Time to take off the snow tires and see if you can save some money on the $1.20 a liter gasoline here in Ottawa.

CPP and EI

Normally around this time of year I am lucky enough to have my CPP and EI payments reach their maximum, I won’t say exactly when since if you remember correctly, if I tell you this, you could then figure out my take home pay (thanks to Michael James on Money for that one). This year however because I have been transfered to a different pay area, my CPP and EI maximums are lost and I must start again from scratch. This means next year, I will get the extra money paid back on my taxes, however, I must continue overpaying, because our accounting system does not believe I paid anywhere else. A frustrating issue, that I have asked about, but given no real good explanation about.

Quicken and TD Not Playing Nice

So TD/Canada Trust has changed their on line banking interface somehow so that now my Quicken cannot do an automagic update from my TD accounts daily (it used to be able to), but now it fails, and I have to go onto the Easyline web site and do the downloads manually, which is annoying. Anybody else run into this interesting bug?

Fifty Cents More for Digital TV?

Rogers sent me yet another offer to get me to change my Cable TV package and this time it worked. The claim was it was going to cost me 50 cents more to get a digital TV box and package than what I currently paid. I was skeptical figuring that was the base cost, but at the end of it after taxes and service charges it was going to be a lot more.

I called, and I was surprised to see that this was not the case, but their claim was fraudulent none the less. The final price was actually 76 cents more than what I currently paid, but they gave me “free installation” to compensate for their mistake. Is this too good to be true? We shall see, I haven’t got my first bill yet, and the box is so small it will be very easy to throw it back to the Rogers Video store near my house.

Me getting a deal? Who would have thought it?

Cigarette Production Down

Good for many reasons, people are saving their money and not spending them on smokes, but also, less smokers usually means better health as well.

Cigarette production in September decreased 11.8% from August to 1.4 billion cigarettes, down 25.7% from September 2006.

Keep that money in your pocket, not going up in smoke.

Weekly Pay is Up In August

Only by $1.13 but that is up from the previous month, so that is not bad at all, really.

In August, the average weekly earnings of payroll employees (seasonally adjusted) increased $1.13 from July to $772.59. The year-to-date growth, calculated as the average of the first eight months of 2007 compared with the average of the same eight months in 2006, was 3.1%.

Good to know this one, but remember rising income, is another part of inflation as well.

In Heaven There is No Beer, That’s Why Canadians Drink It Here

OK, I am paraphrasing from one of my favorite Oktoberfest songs, but Stats Canada says that Beer continues to be Canada’s alcohol of choice, with Red Wine coming in a solid second.

In litres of absolute alcohol, the volume of sales of alcoholic beverages edged up 3.8% in 2005/2006 to 211.9 million litres.

Beer was by far the most popular beverage. In terms of dollar value, beer captured 48.6% of sales, wine, 26.6%, and spirits, 24.8%.

Consumers bought more than 2.2 billion litres of beer, up 2.9% from 2004/2005. This volume was worth more than $8.4 billion, a 4.8% increase.

That’s where some of our money is going, I guess. Alcohol purchases is up by 6.1%, but I can’t actually attest to whether that is true for me or not (I usually drink at friends houses, just ask them).

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