Canadian Personal Finance Blog

No Rate Hikes

So the Bank of Canada kept their overnight target rate at 1/4 per cent for March, giving us all cheap money for a little while longer. Rememmber that the C.D. Howe institute last week urged the bank to go Harder, Faster with their rate increases, but the bank is holding off for now.

The telling phrase to read in this report is:

“…Conditional on the current outlook for inflation, the target overnight rate can be expected to remain at its current level until the end of the second quarter of 2010 in order to achieve the inflation target….”

So the end of the second quarter, or say the June/July time frame, money is going to start getting tighter, which could make for an interesting summer.

Time to start planning on how you are dealing with your debt (if you have it) with a higher interest rate, or what to do about your Bonds, given interest rates will go up.

Federal Budget Looms

I suppose Larry MacDonald will again be locked in a large room with a bunch of other “sweaty” financial newspaper types in preparation for the Federal Budget scheduled for March 4th. Larry always has interesting stories about what really goes on in that room, while all these “touts” pour over the budget to boil the essence of it down to a 1 minute blurb on TV or 750 words or less for the papers.

Hopefully we shall move back to a more balanced budget and maybe put together a plan to start paying off the national debt (again), but stay tuned, I am sure there will be something exciting on Thursday.

Harder Faster

That is actually one of my favorite April Wine albums, but unfortunately it is also the message the C.D. Howe Institute is pushing for Interest Rate increases this year in their report How Soon? How Fast? Interest Rates and Other Monetary Policy Decisions in 2010.

The report itself is a very interesting read on how and why things have happened in terms of credit and interest rates, however, there is a nasty little recommendation that is in it:

When the overnight rate does begin to rise, the changes must be as aggressive as the rate cuts of 2008 and 2009 with increases of 50 basis points at every announcement date until mid-2011 not seeming unrealistic.

Remember how quick and dramatic the rate cuts were last year? There may be an equal and opposite reaction in terms of speed and rate increase this summer and into 2011, which will cause a tightening of credit and tumult in the bond markets too.

Were you planning on renewing your mortgage, or getting a new one? Might be time to lock into whatever rate you can find now, if you need to, since it seems we are in for a bumpier ride in the interest rate world.

And The Winners Are

Yes there were 10’s of entrants to get the free copies of Quicktax, and the winners are:

• • • 2Hirondelles, who was selected by my son from my lucky Pittsburgh Steelers hat.
    • JohnnyG, who was selected by my wife from that same lucky hat!

I will be contacting you via e-mail on how you would like to receive your free software. Congrats to all entrants.

There will be more giveaways soon (as soon as someone gives me more stuff to give away).

This is getting a little repetitive but Bank of Canada’s key overnight rate remains at 1/4% unchanged again this month. The overall Bank Rate remains at 1/2% as well, which means cheap money continues in the market place.

The statement from the bank is mostly that the recovery continues and we should be out of this whole mess some time near the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011, but the important line to read is:

Conditional on the outlook for inflation, the target overnight rate can be expected to remain at its current level until the end of the second quarter of 2010 in order to achieve the inflation target.

The end of the second quarter is June, which means interest rates will be going up this year, and you are running out of time to take advantage of these cheap rates to pay down your debt (assuming you are not paying Credit Card debt, in which case, this has no effect on you). If you have a variable rate mortgage can you lock in, or has the bank already altered it’s rates so that locking in might not be as attractive now?

Remember if the bank raises interest rates to say 2.5% somewhere along the line, that is a huge percentage increase compared to where they are right now.

CPI Numbers Today Too

To confirm the Bank of Canada’s inflation statement, Stats Canada will be posting the CPI numbers for the end of 2009, which should be a very interesting statement. With gas prices inching their way back to $1 per liter, I suspect inflation is back it’s just how bad is the question.

Do you feel lucky? Well do you punk?

After yesterday’s parting comment about “See if you can find a lower rate somewhere else, we dare you!” caused a good reaction, I figured I’d keep going with a snarky remark theme (with proper reverence to Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry).

Most banks these days are banking (pun intended) on you not willing to change banks, thus they treat you like cattle (don’t the waiting lines at the bank branches that are still open not remind you of lines in a slaughter house?). I have talked about this topic ad nauseum, but in case new readers are unaware, your bank does not own you, nor do they own your money, thus you should not feel obligated to stay with a bank, especially if they treat you badly, or give you bad service. This is actually true of all service providing firms (Telephone companies, Restaurants, Grocery stores, etc.,), but acutely more so with banks.

I have changed banks 3 times so far, and have accounts at a few others just in case I feel like changing again, and I have made this approach abundantly clear to my current bank every time I talk with them about a new service, or how they screwed up something else in my financial life.

As I wrote yesterday, TD has decided that they can mess with me, by changing the interest rate on my Line of Credit from being “Prime” plus 0.5% to “Prime” plus 1.0% where they effectively have said, “See if you can find a lower rate somewhere else, we dare you!”. I am pretty sure that if I walked into the BMO branch closer to my house (or the RBC branch even closer), I might get something close if not better (at least in the short term), but am I willing to roll the dice, and change?

Given the dawn of new web sites that allegedly compare different insurance offerings or cell phone plans, this might be a money making idea for someone to set up. Have a user input some simple “service needs” statement from a set of menus and then have all the different banks reply with their best offers (might even be funny to make sure the bank they are currently use, knows this customer is looking around). How hard could this be? What would even be more interesting is if someone like PC Financial or ING did this kind of service so that you could see how much you might save using their services?

Anybody who wants to try this, I will gladly kibitz for them (I am not a consultant only a Kibitzer).

Remember, you read this idea here first!

My wife and I spent about an hour working with our TD/Waterhouse rep attempting to set up an RDSP. Luckily the rep had already pre-read as much information was available from TD (i.e. not very much), and so we spent 45 minutes filling in paper forms.

What really had my head spinning was:

• The large volume of paper forms (that will have the same information transferred to a computer later)
• The repition of the exact same information

The number of times, my wife’s name, address, and other info was awesomely bad. The reason we were given is because this is a new program for TD the enrollment is not automated, and hopefully one day they will automate it, because this paper trail stuff is really for the birds. I had to live through this last year when I opened a Retirement Fund, but I believe I have an answer as to why all this paperwork is necessary.

Each group inside of TD (and any other bank I would guess) that is part of the RDSP system (e.g. accounting, trading, web interface, etc.,) want information, so they design a form that will get all the information they want. The better way would be to have a single larger form which is then shared with all the groups involved in the savings vehicle set up, but I would guess, there are no bonuses paid internally at TD (or most other banks) to streamline customer interface systems, thus the problem is unlikely to be solved in the near future.

I was also dismayed to hear that the RDSP will not be hooked into the on line banking capabilities any time soon either.

I see this constantly with large firms, that each individual “fiefdom” of technology or information inside the firm feels they are omnipotent and worse still, isolated, from other groups, so they simply attempt to make their own lives simpler, and figure out what small part of a larger problem they have, and optimize the solution for their purposes only.

I would bet there are a few consultants out there making a bloody fortune wandering around to large firms and telling them to stop letting their individual groups solve issues at the sub-micron level and to start creating Macro solution teams instead.

I don’t mean to pick on TD, but this period of time got me thinking about when I deal with Bell, Rogers, Any Bank, Hospitals and other customer facing industries/companies it is rare you run into a Customer Initiation system that makes it easy for a new customer to be created.