Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Stats Canada has published an interesting article outlining what your income level in Canada needs to be, to think of yourself as RICH (for 2004 at least):

An annual income of $89,000 was enough to put an individual among the 1.2 million Canadians who made up the top 5% of the country’s taxfiler population in 2004, according to a new study.

Similarly, an income of $181,000 was sufficient to put someone among the 237,000 people in the top 1% of the taxfiler population.

But to be part of the richest one-hundredth of a percent (0.01%) of taxfilers, Canadians had to have income of more than $2.8 million, the study found.

Interesting striation of the data, now this is individual income too, not sure how they would measure dual income families and such, are you Rich? Really Rich? Super Rich?

September continues on, and with the beginning of Autumn, do you need to start thinking about fall financial things?

• RESP top ups for the end of the year?
• RRSP top ups as well?
• Insurance coming due soon?
• Property tax assessments coming?
• Preparation for the holiday season, by planning what you are going to spend and maybe figuring out “who gets what” early on?

Just some of the ideas to think about instead of raking leaves!

So after my posting about the cost of raising kids a while back a lot of folks pointed out the costs of daycare and how this is prohibitive for dual income families. To those who were so vociferous in your commentary about how I had missed the point, please watch the following video which I think puts forth a viable alternative to the high costs of daycare.

Mobilize This!

Report: Many U.S. Parents Outsourcing Child Care Overseas

Related Links:

• My Spouse is Worth How Much: Scenario
• The Disappearing Middle Class in Canada
• Spousal RRSP: Income Splitting
• My Spouse is Worth How Much?
• High Price of Parenting
• My Wife is Worth How Much 2007

Thanks to everyone who commented on my dual income vs. single income family income discussions. That was interesting stuff, I have one more post on that, but I have to do some number crunching first, so I will hold off on that for a little while.

Stats Canada did have a very topical post last week entitled. Family Income which discusses the typical family incomes across Canada. Evidently the Median (remember we talked about what Median means in “Who Lives on the Median Income” , it is the mid point in a list of numbers) income for a family is highest in Ottawa-Gatineau (should I be proud about that?), which is $86,100, which is far higher than double the median income mentioned previously (remember that Median was about $26000 ). For all families in Canada the median is $60,600 which is up 2.1% year over year.

Remember that this is a smaller data set than the generic median income data from last week (it only includes “families”, and not single folks, etc.,).

So what would happen if we gave the Publics from last week the Median income for Canada?

If there was a single income earner and her gross income was $60,600.00 the family would owe: $11,914.32 in provincial and federal taxes and $2640.00 in CPP and EI payments.

If the income was split equally across the two of them they would owe a combined: $8475.42 and $3786.42 and in CPP and EI payments.

In that instance a difference in taxes of about 15.7% (not including things like daycare and such). The dual income model they are more likely to get Ontario Tax Credits as well.