Canadian Personal Finance Blog

As part of the gyrations I must go through to purchase a new vehicle, I must get my new vehicle insured (that is the law, no getting away from that).

The easiest thing for me to do, is to simply remove my old vehicle and add my new vehicle, and pay the difference in premium (if there is any).

This very task I attempted to do, however, I noted that since I am now a member of the Public Service, I receive a discount from my Insurance company, and I thought this would make things so much easier, however, I was mistaken.

Currently I am part of a discount plan given that I was a Nortel employee with this insurance company, and I have my cars insured using this discount. I assumed if I called the “broker” for the Public Service side of the discount, they would simply transfer me over as a customer and that would be it. Yes, dear reader, you guessed it, nothing is as simple as I think it is going to be, and thus the story takes a left hand turn.

Insurance Sequence of Events

I called up the brokers, and said, I am an existing client of the insurance company and I’d like to add a vehicle to my coverage, the young lady on the phone was more than happy to help me out, and she asked for my policy ID to “bring up my file”. I exercised my abilities in the phonetic alphabet rattling of various Alfa, Bravo, Tango and other letters and the young lady typed it all in. There was a long pause and she repeated back to me what I had just told her, and I agreed she had the correct policy number.

Her response surprised me when she said, “I am sorry sir, your policy is not coming up, do you have your policy with this broker?”, I said, “Pardon?”. Evidently since who I have my insurance with is not nearly as important as from whom I have purchased my insurance. I was told that I would need to call the “broker” I had dealt with previously to add my new vehicle.

The interesting twist on this is that the “broker” I deal with is actually part of my insurance company (from what I can tell), and thus I must call my insurance company, have them transfer me to my “broker” and then I can add my new vehicle.

I did finally succeed in getting a new quote for my new vehicle so that task is now complete.

Obtuse Insurance Games

My insurance policies actually renew in a few months, so now I will do something so obtuse that I must write it down to believe this, but here goes:

I will phone an insurance broker to get a quote for my car insurance with the same insurance company that I currently have to see if I can get a cheaper rate for my car insurance, even though the policy will be with the exact same insurance company.

I guess it makes sense given the discounts available, and the free market at work, but it always seems so obtuse that I can get a cheaper price for the exact same product, by simply calling someone else. Yes, I am naive, I assume the cheapest price should just be the normal price, but that is another story.

Interesting Brand Name Funny

When Buick introduced it’s new Luxury Sports Sedan (I have no idea what this class of car is for, but let’s stay on track here) they did not check with their offices in Montreal about the new Brand Name they were going with. This vehicles name is the LaCrosse, but in French Canadian slang, LaCrosse means … ummm … let me put this in a delicate way … male sexual self-gratification, to put it as delicately as I can. I was unaware of this, but I did check with a co-worker who is French Canadian and sure enough, that is the case.

This is almost as good as the Chevy Nova, which in Spanish translates to “No Go”!

OK, nothing to do with money, but still quite funny

For those of you thinking, how can I help, here are a few sites to think about where you can make donations to help out in Haiti:

This list I have shamelessly borrowed from the Canadian Capitalist:

1. Donations through the Canadian Red Cross, which sent $200,000 immediately to support relief efforts, can be made here.
2. Donations to the Salvation Army’s Haiti Earthquake Disaster Relief Fund can be made through this website. Salvation Army is also accepting micro-donations of $5 from donors who text HAITI to 45678 from any Rogers or Bell phone.
3. Donations to UNICEF Canada’s Haiti Earthquake relief efforts can be made here.
4. Donations to the Humanitarian Coalition Online comprising Oxfam Canada, Oxfam Quebec, Care and Save the Children can be made here.
5. Médecins Sans Frontières Canada is also directing donations to Haiti relief.
6. Michael J. points out that World Vision, which has been on the ground in Haiti for more than 30 years, is accepting donations here.
7. Matt N. says Plan Canada is helping children and families in Haiti. Donations are accepted here.

Help, if you can.

My wife a couple of days ago took on the daunting task of creating a space for a gas fitter to come in and work on a new project in our house. Our back room in our basement was very cluttered and there was no way anyone could get anywhere safely, so she took on the task of attempt to clear a space in the chaos.

I came home and was very impressed with the work done and the amount that was being thrown out (although there still is a great deal to dispose of) in some industrial strength garbage bags. The area was swept and cleared so that the work could be done without fear of anyone breaking a leg attempt to scale “mount crap”.

My wife was not impressed when the workman finally showed up and was able to do all the work needed on the main floor of our house and went nowhere near the basement.

Was this a waste of time? NO! That kind of de-cluttering is a good thing for many reasons:

• Safety:that mess was going to injure someone, and could easily have been a fire hazard, so it needed to be lessened in magnitude.
• De-Clutter:the amount of crap that we were never going to use again (and things that should have been disposed of long ago) is now reduced by 9.75% now, which means we only have 90% of it still to clean up (but still a good start)
• Security issues:although it might be possible for an Al-Qaeda cell to hide out in that mess, I did not mean that exactly. We found a whole set of banking records for an organization my wife no longer works for, and those records have now been destroyed. That kind of security is very important.

Do you have a lot of old financial records hidden in the clutter of your “secret stash” (be it in your basement or in that closet you just never open)? Maybe it’s time to at least find all the old credit cards, banking cards, pass books, cheque books and bank agreements that you no longer need and destroy them. Leaving that kind of stuff around is just asking for problems later in life.

If you destroy it now, you know it no longer exists, if you simply “leave it”, do you know if there are records hanging around that can easily be used for identity theft? Maybe it’s time to go clean up a bit? Before you destroy those credit cards, make sure the accounts aren’t still active, as well.

I will neither confirm nor deny that my birthday may or may not have or will occur in the past or next few days, however, I will confirm that my age is in between 30 and 75. Having been crystal clear on this point (no, you should not be publishing on the web your birthday and year, since that is the start of someone stealing your identity or something of the like), let’s talk about the things you might do if your birthday anniversary is some time this year (which I hope it is).

Things to Do Financially on Your Birthday

Just some ideas for some of the financial things you can do on the anniversary of your birth:

• Are you old enough to retire? Seems like a straight forward question, but when can you retire is another question to ask if the answer to the previous question is No? If you can’t even guess when you can retire, then today would be a good day to figure it out, or at least make a guess and work towards it. Aim to retire at 61, that’s an interesting prime age.
• Can you take today off today? Some companies actually give you your birthday off as a vacation day, I think it would be good to know that one (nope, not in my case).
• You can get free meals at some restaurants, I think Denny’s is one of those places, but call around and see where you can eat for free. Free meals is a very good way to celebrate a birthday.
• Does my car registration need to be renewed? Ottawa has an interesting problem because if you don’t renew your registration by your birthday, and take your car to Quebec, you can get fined a LOT of money, because in Quebec they’ll fine you for that one (I think they do in Ontario too, but they don’t worry about it too much until the next month).
• Did your car driving license expire? I was surprised that one year I realized a month after my birthday that I had been driving with an expired license, I received no reminder in the mail. Luckily I was not pulled over or that might have been expensive.
• Has your life insurance premium just jumped? If you have crossed an age group, your term life insurance rate may be increasing, so go check that out.
• Can you get a senior citizen’s discount now? You’d be surprised, a lot of these discounts do not start at age 65, it actually starts at 55.

Any other ideas I may have missed that you should do on your birthday?

In Carnivals my posting Personal Finance Resolutions For the New Year? was mentioned in the Carnival of Personal Finance #239 and the Carnival of Money Stories.

I was astonished at the response I had from my posting Do you have saving questions? and I thank all of those who posted about their financial situations. I will not comment on them specifically, but again, I am astounded by the responses. Honestly that posting started as something completely different and then I realized just how many questions I had written and wondered if I could make an entire post of questions.

New Year Random Thinking

Naturally there were other intriguing posts by my Financial Blogging brethren that are well worth a few minutes to peruse in your spare time:

• Keeping with New Year’s Resolutions, Gail Vaz-Oxlade asks the tough questionWhy are You in Debt?, in fact this is the first of a group of posts. Don’t go over expecting to be treated gently, Gail asks the tough questions.
• Million Dollar Journey had a guest post by Jayn Steele entitled, How an Average Canadian Woman Became Financially Independant, although the title is a misnomer, since if she is financially independent, she is no longer Average.
• Michael James points his razor sharp analytical skills at himself and finds more More Pointless Frugality, but who really thinks about their furnace humidifier that much?
• The Canadian Capitalist bites back at a Shark, by writing a Note to Kevin O’Leary: Don’t confuse GDP Growth with Stock Market Returns hopefuly Mr. O’Leary won’t bite back!
• Larry MacDonald talks about a popular topic The Sandwich Generation which talks about how my generation gets to worry about everyone, not just our kids, oh joy. Jon Chevreau wrote about this as well.
• Preet at WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo.com shows his TechnoGeek side by pointing out that The New Google Phone is NOT a game Changer, he just loves those gadgets.
• Four Pillars puts their money where their mouth is and challenges other Financial Bloggers with their annual 4 Top Stock Picks for 2010 Competition. I wasn’t invited, they must actually read my site then .

Has the New Year already turned sour on you? That’s OK, the Lemon crop is about to fail in Florida, so you can’t make Lemon-aid either…