Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for the ‘Snow’ Category

Yes the forecast “weather bomb” has appeared and dumped a bunch of snow on Ottawa, thus causing all drivers to lose their brains, forget how to drive in snow and the added excitement that even those who own snow tires most likely do not have them on their cars yet, so today will be a day for accidents and arriving very late at work, if at all (thus causing significant economic hardship for a lot of folks (ok, not really but I needed to connect it back to Finance somehow)).

This kind of weather excitement will cause the CAA to take hours to respond, due to their towing service being overtaxed pulling folks out of ditches, cause the police to answer hundreds of calls about accidents and will have Hydro crews out restoring power to lots of folks, so maybe it would be a good day to be Calm, and pleasant with everyone? Just an idea folks, we are all in it together!

It Snowed In Ottawa

Caution for Ontario Drivers

Put on your snow tires if you live around Ottawa is the first caution, because we really DO need snow tires up here (I don’t think I can convince folks from Toronto that, and if you live in Windsor or Niagara, yes, you can live with all seasons, I guess).

For those of us who can drive across a bridge to Quebec, here is an interesting quandary: Quebec has mandatory snow tire laws, are they going to enforce those laws for out of province vehicles? I would guess they might not, but you never know.

Markets Rebound

But is it a rebound or a respite? Very good question, we shall see,  I have gone back in a little with some index fund purchases, but I am still not sold that this is the bottom, as I mentioned yesterday, I’ll tell you in six months whether this is the stock market bottom. The run at the end of the trading day yesterday was qutie astonishing, but we have seen these kind of runs as sell offs as well.

Frank Folds

For those in Ottawa you will be saddened (or happy) that Frank magazine is shutting down. Frank was a satirical paper that had a lot of “insider” gossip from Parliament hill and was funny only when it went way off the normal path and made outrageous statements, that no normal human being would think was “real news”, however politicians always thought it was, and their reactions were priceless.

Many folks in Ottawa have learned that if you drive in Quebec and your “tag” (date of expiration) on your car is the current month, the S.Q. will pull you over and if your registration is expired, they will hit you with a whopping fine (for driving in Quebec with an expired out of province automobile registration).

Cell Phone Usage Ban in Automobiles in Ontario

Since we are talking about cars, the Ontario Provincial government will make it illegal to be talking on your cell phone while driving your car (without a hands free device), but they have also added if you are TEXTing, doing e-mail on a Crackberry type device or a gaming device. I must admit I am guilty of this on occasion ad I welcome this law to stop me from being so stupid, however, for those of you part of the Crackberry cult, put the darn thing down! No e-mail is so important that you must answer it while driving at 100 KM/hr with your children in the back seat!

My regular readers will remember last week I asked, “What is the Bottom in Stocks” and I pointed out we just will not know what the bottom is until six months afterwards, and I was proven right again yesterday, when I (eternal pessimist) thought there was no way things could drop any lower, yet they did. Canadian financial stocks (banks and financial folks) took a hell of a pounding again, and now I am not even sure why, but TD and BMO both took hits again. 

TD’s drop actually had a minuscule basis in fact as their Ameritrade division announced some fairly neutral numbers, but the whole TSX went “Financial Apocalypse” for the last 45 minutes of trading and a great deal of losses were incurred in that sure time frame (stock value losses I mean).

I keep wondering is this the bottom, but as I have said, we will only know in six months time.

Financial Impact on Me

My RRSP’s continue to drop in value (I haven’t looked really, but am glad it is Dividend time since my DRIPs (Dividend Reinvestment Plan) on most of my stocks will be kicking in and I will be buying some very cheap stock with it). I also continue to collect up old investment vehicles into a single set of investment devices, which are now fairly heavy in cash, which is a good thing, now the only question is when and what to buy, and I continue to “waffle” on what that decision might be.

E.I. Not For You

Got a call yesterday from a lady at the Employment Insurance office asking me a bunch of questions about my severance package and how it had been implemented. She was new on her job, so she and I fumbled around a few questions and I think it has been straightened out for now, but this did bring up an interesting point, which is that you MUST apply for E.I. when you are laid off, not when you think you need it. If you don’t apply right away, you may be disallowed your claim for taking too long to fill in the correct documentation.

At the end of the conversation the nice lady mentioned that I will not be eligible to get E.I. for about a year (the length of my severance package in their calculations). This didn’t surprise me, but I know for sure now that someone at the E.I. office has said it to me out loud.

Weather Bomb

Evidently Ottawa will be the victim of a Weather Bomb in the next day or so. Before you start thinking that the folks at Environment Canada have created a Weapon of Mass Destruction that will cause huge storms, that is not what the term means, it is a real Weather Forecaster term to describe a quick and large drop in the Barometric Pressure which is usually part of a severe storm system.

What does this have to do with Personal Finance? Everything!

• With 15-30 centimeters of snow coming Do You Have Your Snow Tires On? I don’t! If you live in Quebec, remember you need to have them on, it is the law now.
• Do you have enough food at home in case it is hard to get out in the next day or so?
• Is your furnace in good working order?
• What if the power goes off, have any wood in for your fireplace?
• Does your snow-blower work? Does it have any gas?

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?

In Ottawa we have a very flamboyant Mayor who came in to power with the statement that he was not going to raise taxes. This statement (I won’t call it a promise) seems to have disappeared and the latest levy he is talking about is a $50.00 surcharge per tax payer and business due to the high amount of snow in Ottawa this year (the snow clearing budget is over budget at least $23 M so far).

Last year we didn’t have a lot of snow, and this same fund ran a surplus, but I never saw a nickel back in my taxes. In fact this fund has run surpluses for the past N years, yet whenever that happened, no money came back to me directly, but now that Mother Nature has stepped in, I must now find more money to pay for bad planning? If I make the bad plan, I am the one that has to live with it, and I must live with the consequences (yes I still complain), but now I must fork out more money, due to there being no emergency fund for excessive snow? Larry, drop by my house and see if you can convince me I should pay this tax, because I don’t think you’ll get me on side with this one.

Easter Charity

I was very impressed to see John Chow campaigning for donations to a soup kitchen in the Vancouver area. John actually matched all donations, and managed to raise over $7,000 for that charity, and I applaud him for that.

For local Ottawa readers, the Shepherds of Good Hope is a mission that I support when I can, given I used to work up the road from them, and I have seen first hand the good works that they do. Remember Easter is a time of renewal and a time of giving.

Scary Statement for the Day

After the U.S. Fed lowered yet another of their key rates by 3/4% one analyst was actually heard to say, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see a rate of 0%…”, I almost fell out of my chair when I heard that one. I think this constant dropping of interest rate may help in the short run, but it is not resolving the main issues which is massive DEBT problems in North America. People are living outside of their financial capabilities, and it is eventually going to cause something very bad to happen.

Carnivals This Week

This week my posting The Seduction of Spending was mentioned in The Carnival of Everything Financial #15 hosted by Everything Financial .

More snow in Ottawa, seems like a broken record, but I think I have got my per use costs on my snowblower down to around $6.00 per use, but I also may have to buy another 10 litres of gas because I am running out. My guess is there is going to be much more snow coming and I am astounded we have anywhere to put the darn stuff.

Financially for the city of Ottawa it means more likely an overrun in their snow clearance budget (that they have been able to use as a “slush fund” (sorry for the pun) the past few years). This will most likely mean higher taxation coming (along with ludicrously higher water rates too).

Bank Rate Drop

In yesterday’s post I touched on an important topic about the Bank Rate Drop of 1/2% from the Bank of Canada. The rates dropping should not be a trigger for folks to go farther into debt (I am writing this as much as a mental note to myself as a commentary to my readers), just because it is cheaper to borrow money, does not mean you should borrow money. Take advantage of these cheaper rates to pay down your debt faster (if your debt has a varying interest rate).

Remember what your mother used to say, “If everyone else went out and ran up $10,000.00 in Credit Card debt, would you too?”. OK, my mother never said quite that, although I believe she did make a comment similar to that.

Budget Passes

The Liberals decided they didn’t want to have an election called on the basis of them defeating a fairly boring budget (with one very nice twist the TFSA), so they didn’t show up for the budget passing vote. Stefan Dion did so that he can claim he voted against it in the next election.

The Aging Workforce

Stats Canada published Canada’s Changing Labor Force 2006 report yesterday and it is an interesting read.

Census data also showed that the aging of Canada’s labour force continued between
2001 and 2006. In 2006, workers aged 55 and older accounted for 15.3% of the total
labour force, up from 11.7% in 2001.

Why do I care? I am heading into that area very soon, and I keep wondering what is really going to happen when all of these folks “retire”? My suspicion is they really won’t retire, they will just change careers and become part time employees or something like that. There will be a shortage of trained folks in a lot of areas, but my opinion is it won’t be as bad initially, because a lot of those folks are just going to “scale back” work, and not actually stop working.

Anyone care to throw their opinion on this interesting topic?