My wife and I have fallen into the daily trip to the grocery store trap (very dangerous, because you just never figure out how much you are spending until you do your Quarterly Financial Report).
We came up with an idea, that I am pretty sure we can’t live up to, but I throw it out to the folks who might also have fallen into this gas wasting, and money wasting trap.
Premise: You are spending too much money going to shop every day for groceries, and you are wasting gas doing the trip every single day.
Yup, if you are going to go to the grocery store every day, you must walk there ( we will accept cycling there or taking the bus, if you have a bus pass). I will allow for if you go shopping on the weekends, you can drive 1 day, to pick up a “weekly order“, however all other times you must walk.
Why walking? Am I some kind of Physical Fitness Wacko? Nope, but let me be more precise:
As I said, me and Mrs. C8j may try this out, we did on Monday, and it was quite nice, but I was on vacation that day as well.
After last week’s “show and tell” about Mortgage worksheet calculators, the next question to ask yourself is which is more important to pay into your Retirement Fund (RRSP or 401k) or pay off your Mortgage (and debts)? Since the U.S. model has tax implications for paying off your Mortgage, and I do not wish to mention the Smith Manoeuvre for Canada, let’s just concentrate on the Canadian model.
In a lot of cases this question is of no real value since a lot of people can only afford to pay for their living expenses and do not have free money to pay for their retirement or speed up their debt payments, for those folks, the job is hard enough, but I encourage you to find savings somewhere and do something more with your found money than “party” with it.
Some of the reasons I have heard and espouse for paying down your mortgage first would be:
The reasons to put money in your retirement funds are many as well:
That would be telling, I’ll write some more about this tomorrow, but I am open to discussion, pointers to good articles, and any other comments folks might have about what the right choice for them was and is (remember at the end of this, it is a personal choice on your part).
Back in 2005 just when I was starting to blog, I never really knew what I was going to write about (nothing much has changed), so I wrote about the system I put in place to ensure that my kids got their allowances.
As a follow on to the story my oldest child is now 18, so I no longer will be allowed to directly access her bank account any more (something to keep in mind).
OK, so back to what this blog is about, real world financial ranting.
For the longest time my wife and I tried to get the kids on an allowance, so that they could learn what money is, how it works and some responsibility, but inevitably, we’d forget for a couple of weeks, try to catch up and eventually just gave up (much to the kids chagrin). Interesting, we were trying to teach the kids responsibility and all it did was show how irresponsible their parents were (now THAT is ironic).
About 6 years ago I was in the TD on one of my yearly visits, getting my bank fees waived for a year, and get them to fix something they had screwed up (I think it was my mortgage that year), when I asked about kids’ bank accounts. My brother sends the girls money every year, and we had got to the point where we didn’t want to just buy them toys with it. The poor woman who’s life I was ruining for the day, said the accounts could be opened then (since the kids had SIN numbers), and the accounts would show up “under” my account on my on line banking.
A day or two later, a light went on in my head. I called the bank on the phone lady (who I now call once a year, because I do most of my banking on line, but couldn’t figure out how to do what I wanted). I asked her to set up weekly transfers from my account to my kids accounts, thus assuring that the money was paid every week (whether I remembered or not).
Well, it has worked, the kids get their weekly allowances AND they actually do things like:
So it seems this experiment has worked, chalk one up for me.