With Canada Day (July 1st) falling on a Wednesday and the 4th of July falling on a Saturday it makes for odd holiday patterns for both Canada and the U.S.A., my guess would be a lot of folks in Canada are taking Thursday and Friday off and making for a Mega-Long weekend.
To my American brother(s) and sisters I wish you a Happy 4th!
In the blogs this week some very interesting views of important issues in Personal Finance and Investing:
Remember the Globe and Mail Best of the Money Blogs voting continues until Monday as well! Enjoy the Mega-Long weekend.
Interesting turn of phrase I have seen used to mean a few different ideas in the software development world and in a few other places as well.
The Interpretation I got for this phrase from the person who sent me was:
Eating your own dog food
It seems to be an extension on the concept of “Practicing what your preech” or “Walk to the walk, don’t just talk the talk…”, but finding a company that actually uses their own product can be a good thing, I have found in my travels in the world of high tech.
Investing and Financial Institutions are a little harder to figure out if they “Eat their own dog food“, I think it would be amusing to find out that the CEO of my bank didn’t use the bank for his finances (if not very disconcerting).
I would be very interested to see if the following might be happening:
Any other examples of “Eating their dog food” in the financial world I have missed, please chime in the Comments section.
I have written previously about if it’s not written down, how do you know it happened (a phrase I stole from Tom Clancy), and last week I wrote about financial plans (and revisiting them mid-year), and that is another good example of something you should write down somewhere. Simply thinking up a financial plan but not writing it down, or building a spreadsheet to monitor it (or some tool like that), how can you tell if you are succeeding or not?
Without writing down your goals and your plans, your mind can play tricks on you, or worse you can forget important goals that you need to achieve to reach Financial Nirvana (as it were)? You don’t need to be journaling or anything like that but simply creating a simple document with your goals written down may be enough for you to keep those goals in mind over the year. It’s not very hard, and a very useful way to keep yourself focused and also a way to keep yourself motivated.
Examples of things you should write down:
Nortel announced the sale of their wireless division on the weekend for $650M which is a good thing for the folks left at Nortel, a good thing for Nokia/Siemens but not sure if it is good for Nortel creditors or pensioners (remains to be seen). For the longest time the wireless group was the engine that drove Nortel sales and revenues, so to see it sold for such a discount, it is sad, but hopefully it means the remaining survivors at Nortel can keep their jobs.
As I write this the City of Toronto is poised to be crippled by a Garbage strike, I can’t recall any garbage strikes I have lived through, although I have seen video of the garbage strike in London England in the mid-70’s, and I was very impressed by how much garbage a big city can accumulate in a very short period of time (and the mess it can create). Striking during an economic apocalypse is a gutsy play, but then again Refuse Collection is one of those jobs that not many folks would do either, so we shall see. Might be time for Torontonians to look into cholera shots?
For the Fathers out there hope you enjoyed your day, traditionally the day when the most collect phone calls are made, sort of sums up being a Dad, doesn’t it?
With Summer coming very soon (on Sunday in fact), and Father’s Day on the same day this weekend looks to be an eventful one for us all.
Financially the week has seen the Nortel CEO Mike Z. standing in front of a group of Canadian politicians and saying, “It simply wasn’t feasible to pay severance,” , you have to respect his chutzpah, but when he started saying he might not get his sweetheart pension, I think he lost all credibility. With the CPI at 0.1% we are in interesting areas where allegedly our prices are not rising, yet the price of food is up 7.1% over 12 months, so the numbers are actually hiding a big issue (i.e. the poor and fixed income folks dealing with huge food price increases). Evidently this means our interest rates may stay as low as they are for a while longer, which is just wild (IMHO).
Some interesting posts from my regular reads on the Financial blogging front:
Stay tuned this weekend, there may not be a video interlude, but there might be something even more interesting. Enjoy the start of summer and remember to call your Dad on Father’s Day!