Canadian Personal Finance Blog

About 8 years ago, my wife and I bought something at Colonial Furniture, and paid it off on lay away using a “no interest” plan of some kind. At the end of the period, when we finally paid off this bill, we had made a mis-calculation and over paid the bill by about $4.56, but nothing has ever happened with this positive balance (I have not bought anything there since).

The stupid part of this is that every month since I paid off this bill I receive a balance statement telling me about my positive balance. If my caculations are right I have received about 90 of these notices, and this must have cost somewhere near $40.00 in postage for Colonial, to tell me about my positive balance.

Every month I get this invoice and every month I scratch my head wondering why they do it. In other instances where I have had a positive balance, I have simply received a cheque to return the balance to zero, but not here. 

Rocky Financial Roads

Given the complete implosion that seems to be happening in the United States, I continue to get from friends articles about the impending end of civilisation as we know it. My opinion is that this whole thing are ripples from the ill-conceived “Sub-Prime Mortgage” fiasco in the states, and my guess is there are more ripples to be felt, which hopefully will not cause too many more days like Wednesday.

My portfolio is not doing too badly, but I do see some stocks that may never recover and one of them being Nortel . It is now down to $2.76 but if you take out the reverse stock split the stock is actually worth $0.276 (Canadian), and they continue to sell things off to get money.  I hold a little Nortel in one trading account, mostly because I never got around to selling it, and now it isn’t even worth selling (I’d spend more on the trading fees, than I would get from the sale).

Is this “correction” a buying opportunity? I think some time soon it will be, if not right now, but remember to do your homework and don’t just “buy because I think it is on sale”, because if you had done that with Nortel in 2002, you’d have been mistaken. Do the homework, investigate the company, make sure their financials are sound and the company is sound as well.

Lock It Up

Debit Fraud Follow Up

Some excellent comments yesterday about my article about Debit Card Fraud . I think I will be going more towards a cash based purchase system to remove some of this risk, but a few commenters mentioned using a credit card instead, since your liability is limited. 

While this method may work for a lot of people, I don’t think it is for me, since a few years back we tried this with a PC Financial Mastercard, to get money back on our groceries. Due to some bad tracking by me, I ended up with a ballooning credit card balance that scared me, so we ended up paying off the card quickly and then going back to using the debit card.

Lies, Damn Lies and Stock Price Trends

To paraphrase Benjamin Disraeli. One of my favorite times of the year is here, with the opening of the N.F.L. season and with baseball coming down to the end of the season, the orgy of numbers coming from both games is astounding and quite satisfying for a number nut like me.

As a kid I reveled in the numbers from Baseball and loved collecting them and comparing them, but even as a kid I learned that all the numbers in the world are only telling you what happened in the past (which can be very important), but these numbers do not necessarily point to what will happen in the future. It is important to know what has happened in the past (because we do not wish to re-do our previous mistakes) but to know the future is what we all crave.

Football is awash in numbers to the point where there is an entire industry that has been created to use the statistics created by football games (Fantasy Football leagues), which astounds me, that you create a game from a game (is that recursion?).

Financial analysts do the same things to investors. They have mega-tonnes of data on every single stock and what it has done since it’s inception, and there are entire companies making fortunes analyzing these numbers, predicting what stocks “might” do by doing this analysis.

My understanding of the stock market, is that it has no conscience and no memory. Each day is a new day, and it’s like a Simpson’s episode (i.e. most of what happened yesterday isn’t relevant and it is forgotten) on the Equities market.  The simple fact a stock went down the previous day does not mean it will drop the next day (that fact alone, there may be other much better reasons, but the previous drop means nothing).

I have to laugh when I hear about “downward trends” and “upward trends” being reasons alone to buy or sell stocks, you may as well base your purchases on your lucky rabbit’s foot if you are going to think that way.

Keep crunching those numbers, but remember the numbers alone are meaningless without the context of why the numbers happened.

Yup, time for another election folks, whoopee!! Who will come out on top? I don’t care, whoever it is, get the heck out of my bedroom and my wallet (to paraphrase Pierre Elliot Trudeau). 

Stephen Harper dropped by the Governor Generals place at 9:00 AM on a Sunday (wonder if she was dressed by then) and the government was dissolved. All this and the poor woman couldn’t go to the Paralympics Games opening ceremonies.

My wife and I will be playing the fun game: “How many political party signs can we get on our front lawn”, you should try as well, if someone sends me a picture of their lawn with GENUINE political signs on their front lawn, I will post them (I promise).

The questions I will be asking anybody who shows up on my doorstep from any party:

1. What is your party’s status on income sharing between spouses who are  younger than 55 years old and don’t have pension income?
2. How will your party help students attempting to not carry a crushing debt load when they graduate from University?
3. Will your party bring in stronger controls of Pay Day Loan companies?
4. If I vote for your party, will you help me find a job in the government? Really, come on, give an unemployed guy a break!
5. What is your party’s stance on the Federal Government standardizing their databases so that Canadians are not “tracked” in more than 10 different Federal government databases?

Any other questions folks might want to ask, add them in, I’ll post the best of on Friday.

Google Turns 10!

Yup 10 years ago on Sunday Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and now it is worth over $150 Billion dollars. How? They went where the money is, advertising, and they also innovated when others were attempting to only survive, way to go guys, now can you please increase my Adsense payments?

Another company that might have been good to buy, even after the RIDICULOUS IPO price (who knew?).