Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for the ‘Pay Cheques’ Category

In Ottawa this week our Hockey team fired yet another coach, meaning our team is actually paying for 3 different coaches right now (the one we fired last year, the one we fired this year, and the current coach), which is not very good planning (paying 2 people NOT to do a job), however, the main statement is that the previous coaches did not hold the players accountable for their play (i.e. the players were allowed to do what the heck they wanted without concern of less playing time, or punishment for sloppy play in practice) and thus the players were “lazy”.

This got me thinking this accountability concept is vital in business and a few of the bigger problem areas of the economy there is a lack of accountability seen as well.

Bank CEO’s

We are seeing the Canadian Bank CEO’s making an attempt to appear to be “tightening their belts” and “taking one for the team” by eschewing some bonus money. While my opinion is this isn’t enough, at least the optics of the acts show at least some penitence for their actions, and thus some perceived accountability.

High Tech

There I don’t see as much. Nortel’s CEO has still not really shown any contrition or accoutability in his actions, which makes a lot of folk wonder does he feel accountable for the companies current situation? Employees who are about to get laid off with little or no severance are not as likely to “go to the wall” if they know their CEO is still raking in big money.

John Chambers from Cisco on the other hand for a while (and might still now, I can’t find any coroboration) took a salary of $1 per year (he got other compensation), but that alone has great optics for employees. Is he still very rich? My guess is it is not likely that he is trying to create extra income for his family by taking a part time job at Home Depot.

Overall Accountability

Accountability of the folks in power and of anyone you deal with directly (especially when it comes to your money) is a vital thing to look for. 

If you have a financial advisor, how are they accountable to you? If they give  you bad investment advice what happens? Ask that if you are talking to your advisor. If their answer is, “… well, I’ll try to do better next time”, you might want to think about not hiring them. How can you make this person accountable for their decisions with your money?

How do we make CEO’s of large firms accountable? Make sure if you are a stock holder you vote for your Board of Directors, since they are supposed to represent your best interests (whether they do or not, is another question). Go to the yearly stockholders meetings, ask questions and read the company prospectus (no matter how painful it might be).

You can’t hold someone accountable for anything, if you aren’t sure of what they are doing, and you can’t ask pointed questions about what is being done, if you don’t know, “what is being done”.

Make yourself accountable for your decisions, but also make the folks you deal with directly (and those that work for you) accountable for their actions and decisions, it will make the whole system work that much better.

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).

National Capital Financial Bloggers Association

• Michael James on Money
• Canadian Capitalist
• Canadian Money Blog Reviews
• Dividend Matters
• Investment Ideas Blog

Had an odd occurrence last Friday, I got my pay stub from work (I remember when I used to get a pay cheque, and how it felt so nice to look at it, but I digress), and opened it expecting to see my regular bi-weekly pay. There are only 3 points in the year where my net pay changes:

• First pay cheque in January where CPP and EI payments appear
• Some pay cheque in the year, where my CPP and EI are paid in full
• If there is a tax cut or my benefits start costing more.

I was surprised to see the “magic pay deposit number” on my pay cheque was askew $20.00 (less unfortunately). I went to Quicken which keeps track of this for me, and I saw that my benefits package charge went up $20 or so, which caused me to wonder what was going on.

I have “Flex” benefits, which every year get more and more expensive and the coverage I get is less and less (I think I have whined about this a few times so I will reserve my rant about this for when I have to enroll again this year). Nothing had changed, yet my benefits charge was up, so I sent in a complaining note to my payroll department, who are “investigating” what happened. I await an explanation still.

It is important to watch your pay stubs as they go by, and not just assume it is all working fine. Remember it is your money they are fiddling around with.

More Fuel Guzzling

We Canadians love our fossil fuels and our consumption continues up 1.1% year over year from last year at this time. I guess with the powerful Canadian dollar, we can afford it.