Canadian Personal Finance Blog

For my regular readers, I am so lazy swamped over the holidays that I am taking some time off and putting up a “Best of” anthology until the New Year (January 4th to be exact). Enjoy two Best of posts a day over the Holidays and have yourself a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

The year slowly draws to a close, but fear not good reader, I still have a few more morsels of financial fun for your reading satisfaction. Tomorrow will be a real corker, but I don’t want to get you too excited so here are three more interesting post from the past year.

Taboo Subjects With Kids (2009/12/01)

Larry MacDonald asked me a few questions for an article he is working on, and it caused me to think a bit more about a subject that it is important as parents to talk to our kids about. This subject is taboo in most families and is certainly not a normal dinner table topic, and I must say that as a child growing up my parents never brought this subject up, and I must also admit that most of what I learned about it initially I learned “on the street”……

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Men’s Health  (2009/12/17)

More studies are coming out that are pointing out that thanks to Erectile Dysfunction medications (like Viagra) men seem to be getting healthier…….

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Sometimes the Problem Changes (2009/10/20)

As part of my every day life, I help out at my Church with the computers (remember volunteering is a good thing to do), and one of the weekly events that should happen is back up of the computers at the Church (as it should for all of us, are you doing backups?). For the longest of times I used a CD-RW (read write CD) to back up this data, but over time the data set grew, and eventually we had to use 2 CD’s to accomplish the task……..

Click here for the complete post

For my regular readers, I am so lazy swamped over the holidays that I am taking some time off and putting up a “Best of” anthology until the New Year (January 4th to be exact). Enjoy two Best of posts a day over the Holidays and have yourself a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Todays posts are diverse in that they talk of Debt and it’s ability to sneak up on you and how Cable over usage can happen when you aren’t looking as well!

I Didn’t Know I was That Far In Debt!

I have found two new guilty pleasure shows on TV, one is 16 and Pregnant on MTV (that one I can’t even talk about right now, I’ll save that for a separate rant) the other is “I Didn’t Know I was Pregnant” where women explain how they can go 9 months carry a child and then claim they never knew they were pregnant. ……

Click here for the complete Post

Rogers Cable and Overruns  (2009/08/25)

One of the problems of having a lot of computers around my house and having a large number of teenagers is that my Internet connection does get heavily used, but I hadn’t had any problems until last month.

Click here for the Complete Post

I am just that lazy busy that I can’t think of writing something for the Monday before Christmas so I instead give you some of the best writings from other folks this past week.

With the Holiday Season upon us, I trust everyone is finished their preparations and are all just relaxing and waiting for the festivities to commence. Yes, I am a sarcastic so and so sometimes aren’t I, but let’s not dwell on the obvious, what did those other authors write?

• The Canadian Capitalist must be finished his shopping, as he has time to read a bunch of books including The Investor’s Manifesto , which he thinks is well worth stuffing into someone’s stocking.
• Gail Vaz-Oxlade talks about another great book for Christmas in The Glass Half Full (ok it’s her book, but it’s still good to get for Christmas).
• Michael James is making sure that there are no Mice stirring in his house when he states Sometimes Frugality Can be Taken Too Far . I always thought they were disposable too.
• Preet at WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo gets festive with a post about The Elves Index, OK it has nothing to do with Christmas, but the title does.
• Larry MacDonald points out the importance of keeping things over the holiday in the correct perspective in his post Ten Things to Know about rebalancing. No, again, nothing to do with Christmas, but work with me people!
• Canadian Dream at 45 suggests we Slow Down a Bit This Holiday Season which really is about Christmas and the holidays!
• The Four Pillars gets into the holiday season with their Last Minute Cheap Gift Guide, remember a roll of toilet paper is cheap and most of us can use it this time of year too!
• AllFinancialMatters talks about 3 more books Three Great Books to Give Away This season, to be exact.
• Riscario has a catchy holiday title The Gift of Networking, and networking is very important if you are looking for a job!

Hope your shopping is going well, remember YOU are the economic stimulus the economy needs (me, I’m too cheap to matter).

After switching off the Grey Cup (I stopped watching after the Alouettes vaunted defense gave up their 27th point), it dawned on me that no matter how it stacks up, in football, as in life, there is just no sure things. Every pundit that talks about the CFL (admittedly not a huge subset of sports writers) had the Alouettes victory parade already planned, and when I sat down to watch the game, I expected to see an annihilation of biblical proportions.

Evidently no one told the Roughriders from Saskatchewan (not to be confused with the hopefully soon to be resurrected Rough Riders from Ottawa) that they were supposed to roll over and die, and they decided to make it an exciting and close game (which luckily the Alouettes did finally win).

Football and Financial Planning?

What does this have to do with Financial Planning? First thing is, I didn’t have anything to write about before the game started, and you almost had a “Sorry, no post today, busy watching the Grey Cup”, but thanks to the closeness of the game, I had a story idea watching the game.

Second point is, no matter what assurances any financial planner, financial pundit or financial blogger makes about any financial plan, investment idea, or stock tip, they could very well be wrong (like the 90% of writers who picked the Alouettes annihilating the Roughriders). Be skeptical about any advice you get, and look in depth into what you are being told, and remember that no matter what decision you make, there will be risks involved in your decision. There are no sure things, keep that in mind.

Yes, the Alouettes did manage to pull the game out on the last play of the game, but the contest itself was much closer than expected, and it took a lot of luck for the Als to finally succeed (when they were supposed to win easily).

Yes, I also had to rewrite this post, because I had it all done with 4:00 left in the game and I was sure the Als were going to lose, which also shows that even when you are sure something is going to happen, sometimes things change drastically very quickly (like the Als comeback).

Remember, my only advice is, there are no sure things in life.

Oh and Congrats Alouettes, I never doubted you for one minute (where did that bandwagon go?).

Bring back the Ottawa Rough Riders too!

So as my regular readers know I have been grappling with how to lower my cell phone costs (without getting rid of them completely). About a month ago my wife took the bold first step of going from a Bell “Contract” (which had expired) over to a Telus “pay per use” phone.

This was done as an experiment to see how things might work, and we found out that:

• To set up the new phone is relatively painless, but know which phone you would like first and make sure you use the on line system management capabilities to track your account.
• Number Portability is easy to use, but has a few pitfalls in it. If you are going to port a number, make sure you bring a Customer ID or your old phone bill to the NEW carrier (to make this work faster).

My wife had her new phone working with her old phone number within an hour or two and she was very happy with her new phone (she loathed her old phone) and has been happily texting and using her new set up.

This all transpired about 2 weeks ago.

A few days ago the Bell bill showed up and that is when I lost 66 minutes of my life and about $36 as well.

I checked the Bell Wireless bill on line and was confused to see the total on the bill was about as much as it normally was, given my wife and I were “twinned” on a single plan, however, given my wife’s phone number no longer was running on Bell I suddenly needed to read much closer.

So two major things looked like gouging wrong on my bill:

1. My wife’s old phone number was still being billed by Bell, even though it was connected to the Telus network
2. My phone (which was still connected to the Bell network) was running a different “service package” and I had been billed for $22 worth of texting charges

I was confident that if I called the Bell 1-800 number I would get satisfaction and would get these charges reversed, however I was only 1/2 correct.

Tomorrow: How hard could it be to right such obvious wrongs? Oh naive reader, you just wait.

Back to the Carnivals

My post about Risk has been picked up by Carnival of Money Stories , and the  The Carnival of Personal Finance (Thanksgiving Edition) go on over and read some of the other interesting posts there as well.