Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Where has all the money gone?

So this topic comes from a comment from my friend Michael James on commenting on my “self pitying” posting of getting older yesterday. The quip is actually quite topical, I have earned well over a million dollars in my 20+ years of working. Where did all that money go?

If you think about it, where it always goes:

• Taxes
  • Federal Taxes which had to have eaten 10-20% of it over the years
  • Provincial Taxes which ate about the same if not a little less
  • GST and PST can’t even fathom how much I have paid for those little consumption taxes.
  • Municipal Property Taxes, which keep going up as well. How much? 4-8% of my income is a good guess.
  • Employment Insurance payments, and I have never claimed against this system (touch wood). That is money completely lost.
  • Canada Pension Plan Payments (and a little QPP as well), hopefully I’ll get some of that back one day.

  That’s about 25-45% of the money right there, and I haven’t spent a cent yet!

• Living, which might include rent and mortgage payments and such, which has to be about 10-20% of that money.

So I have about 40% of my income left and I haven’t fed anyone, bought a single coffee or gone on a wild spending binge?

It’s interesting just to look back and if I told myself when I started working that I’d have earned over a million dollars by now, but not be living in a villa on the Riviera, I don’t think my younger self would have believed it.

Tax Preparation Coming

It is that time of the year to start looking at tax software and start monkeying around with my taxes. Our friend the Canadian Capitalist is looking at Ufile instead of Quicktax this year. Quicktax seems to be cutting the number of possible returns to be done down to TWO (2) but I need to research this more to figure out whether I can use this or not, given my oldest daughter now is old enough and has income. Stay tuned, I am sure I will rant more about this topic very soon.

Move Complete

My Blogspot account is now permanently aimed at this site. The move over is complete, I hope.

After a snowy week in Ottawa, here are some random thoughts in the area of Personal Finance:

• New housing prices are up 6.1% year over year for October. This rate is slowing, but is still pretty darn crazy in some areas.
  • Saskatoon is up 47.9% year over year for new housing prices
  • Edmonton is up 24% year over year
  • Amazing
• More statements about young Adults staying at home to build up a “nest egg” to buy a house. Stats Canada reinforces that statement, sure hope my kids aren’t reading this, remember moving out is a good thing! Get rid of those darn Kippers!
• The net financial debt of Provincial and Territorial governments is down again, which is a great thing to read, but then again, how about the municipal debts in those areas?
• In Ottawa evidently 0% is actually 4.9%, where our Mayor ran on a ticket of 0% property tax increases and now the City council has passed a budget with a 4.9% property tax increase. Luckily OC Transpo is also increasing their bus pass costs by 7.5% every year for the next 3 years. They keep this up and it will be cheaper to send my kids to private school than it will to buy them a Bus Pass! (what font should I be using for rants). If you want to read the draft budget it is 837 pages long, which explains why our taxes are so high, if it takes that long to describe everything, this is BIG government.
• The Christmas season is upon us, remember to look for good deals, and that the size of the present doesn’t matter (but then again, I am a man as well, and we believe size never matters, except in cars).

Didn’t really have too much to write about after a busy weekend of buzzing from gym to gym, however this morning I was watching a local “Morning Show” and on it was someone from a site that claims they can lower your property tax assessment Guaranteed (this of course caused me to wake up a lot more and listen).

The site in question is called AssessYourAssessment (this is not a paid ad for this site). You go to the site type in your Ontario address (I believe this is an Ontario only service) and they will then check the municipal rolls (roles?) and more likely than not do a comparison with what your neighbours pay and then tell you that you are overpaying your property taxes (in my case they claim it is over $525 a year). That sounds like a lot of money I’d like to keep for myself.

The other interesting point they make is that if you appeal you assessment now you can get money back from this year and you will save the money next year as well (hence the number they quote you is double what you will actually save each year). They warn that you only have 20 days left to make an appeal on this year’s assessment.

This is a thought provoking service, I am not sure I am going to use it, because they want to charge me about $170.00 to appeal my property tax assessment for me, and the kicker is their “money back guarantee” only claims they will get your taxes lowered, not by how much, so if they lower your assessment by $1, you would still be on the hook for their entire payment.

How hard is it to appeal your Property Tax assessment in Ontario is my question? Anybody?

Property taxes are the only tax (I think) on something you own, year over year. I don’t get “taxed” on my car (well yes I do with license and registration), and the other funny thing is that the Government takes more money when they think your house is worth more, so I am actually taxed on “value” not on actual money I have in my hand. There really does need to be a better way to get municipalities tax money, because this system seems very obtuse to me.