Canadian Personal Finance Blog

One of the important parts of Financial Planning is to have credible and attainable goals and targets for your plan. If you don’t have a target, how can you tell if you are accurate?

With this in mind here is an important example of how if you have a target, your aim gets much better, and thus your aim at the target of your plan is better too.

Aim and Fire

This urinal has a small fly in it, which causes users of this urinal’s “accuracy” to increase by 80% (or decrease “spills” by that amount at least).

The trick is that at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam (ok outside of Amsterdam), do not have a bathroom attendant who puts a new fly in after each use, no, this is a STICKER of a fly, and this sticker has decreased the mess and filth in the bathrooms at Schiphol.

Look Closer:

What a great idea!!

Punch Line: Remember if you don’t have a target how can you tell if you are accurate or not .

Yet another example of what happens when I procrastinate has reinforced my belief that as a tactic in life procrastination is highly underrated. Many things in life will either go away, or rectify themselves if you give them time.

Can procrastination be a viable financial planning concept?

Procrastination Works

In these situation procrastination may actually help you out:

• Large purchases such as cars or houses. By not doing anything you may actually end up keeping large amounts of money in your investment vehicles and gaining value, and you aren’t paying down large debts that you have accrued.
• Selling stocks when they are down. If you procrastinated through this last bit of bad times, you most likely held onto some stock that will regain it’s value and appreciate more.
• Get rich schemes from friends and family, if you wait long enough you will have “missed the boat” but will still have your money too.

Procrastination is Very Bad

When is procrastination a bad strategy?

• Ignoring paying of bills, this is a very bad thing. If you don’t pay your credit card or your utility bills or any other monthly bills, you will end up with a large debt and most likely living in a dark and cold home.
• Not putting money in your RRSP until February 33rd is a bad use of procrastination, put your RRSP money in as early and often as you can.
• Not paying your taxes on time (municipal, federal, etc.,) is really kind of bad too (luckily in Canada we don’t have the IRS and their sweeping powers, however the CCRA can do stuff to you too).
• Not having an emergency plan financially.

Really?

I guess you can see that procrastination may not be the best concept for your financial plan, but remember it can be your friend sometimes, just don’t use it as your only weapon or tactic in your Financial Plan. Pay what needs to be paid now, but think about those big purchases and maybe see if time can help you with that part of your plan.

Canadian Governments as a whole continue to run a surplus for the fiscal year ending March 31,2007, announced Stats Canada today. These groups of government built up a surplus of over $29 Billion which is quite impressive, until you realize that heavy weight on your back is YOU paying that money. The problem we currently have is our free spending parents in the 70’s and 80’s racked up huge deficits in government which then led to HUGE debts, which now have to be paid back (yes I am being facetious here, a little).

Spending increased 4.9% in 2007, a somewhat faster pace than the increase in revenues of 4.7%, reversing the trend of the past few years. During the last five years, expenditures have increased by 25%, slightly lower than the growth rate of 29% in revenues.

The three main components of revenues are income taxes, consumption taxes and contributions to social insurance plans. Combined, they account for over 70% of total revenues.

That answers our questions about where all this money came from. I realize in a Social-Democratic nation like Canada there is an importance in the government and their programs, and a lot of this spending goes into useful things like health care and such, but given the expenditures include payment back of debts owed:

Debt charges represented 7.6 cents out of every dollar of government revenues in 2007, down from 7.9 cents in 2006. This continues the declining trend of the last 10 years.

(this declining is a good thing (in that they are actually paying DOWN the debt, where other nations are not doing this, currently)), but where is this surplus going? Straight onto owed debt or into NEW spending? I hope onto the debt mostly and then onto existing programs like health care.

In other news, if you remember my Thomas The Tank Engine and Financial Planning article, you might also be interested that these same toys have been recalled due to lead being in the paint of some of the engines. My son’s toy collection is now a little smaller, as we have taken away the affected objects. Read more about the Thomas the Tank Engine Toy Recall here.

Related Articles:

• Canadian Net National Debt
• Zen, Thomas and the Art of Financial Planning