Canadian Personal Finance Blog

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?