Canadian Personal Finance Blog

No Food During Frosh Week?

So as my daughter’s first terms at University come closer we learn more and more about what we will and will not be paying for during her term(s) there. This week we found out that during Freshman week (or FROSH week in my day), she can move into her dorm room, but the cafeteria will not be serving food until the first day of classes. We now must sleuth out what exactly that might mean. Our guess is there is some food somewhere, but we are not sure how that is going to work, hopefully she won’t have to become a “Hunter Gatherer” for the week.

Voice Over IP or Cell Phone?

The next interesting point is that the University does not supply a phone line, I can arrange to have phone service, but it would be easier for her to simply use her Cell phone as her default phone service and be done with it. That is my guess as to how this could work.

Another option was pointed out to me by a co-worker, which is a new service offered called Free Phone Line which offers a local number for FREE in many areas in Ontario (not K/W yet, but soon).  Free phone line gives you a Voice Over IP (VoIP) client for your PC which you can then use as your local phone, or you can forward that number to another number permanently (say like your cell phone). I have already set up a number in Ottawa for me to try the service out (the number simply forwards to my cell phone right now). Lots of other stuff offered by this firm, but I am still mulling over how this might all work.

I spoke to the Free Phone Line tech folks and they had some suggestions too (and had some input to me about how the University might view the VoIP client as well), given the service is free, I like it so far.

If anyone has suggestions or comments about food or phones, please feel free to chime in.

The Parable of the Long Distance Bill

Things certainly have changed from when I went to University. I had a roommate who had a girlfriend at an out of town university, and thus there only way of communicating was via Canada Post and Telephone (remember this was 1980). They were very much In Love (what is the font for sarcasm?), but they were also trying to be cheap so they only made calls to each other after 11:00 PM during the week (did I mention I am an early sleeper and an early riser? That’s ok, I didn’t deal with it well, and was quite immature, as can be expected from a 19 year old, but that is for other stories).

The first phone bill showed up (I had never seen a phone bill in my life ’til then), so I opened it, and said out loud “WTF” (but not as a TLA either), it was for $125.00. I got back to our room and told my roommate and said, “I can’t afford this big a phone bill, this University is ripping us off!”.

My roommate then calmly looked at the bill and said quietly to me, “Your portion of the bill is $15.00…”, and then he pointed out there were 4 calls to my parents (all on Saturday in the afternoon and each for about 4 minutes). I then did the math and realized my roomie was putting out $110 to stay in touch with his girlfriend. I don’t think he married her, but he sure spent a heck of a lot on her in long distance phone bills.

I have told my daughters this story and pointing out that this had better not happen to them!

I get hundreds of spam and phishing e-mails at work, and for the e-mail account I use for this blog I get thousands of offers, spam, and phishing e-mails, and I have seen pretty much every one that has been sent (although I still wonder why only my girlfriend worries about the size of my penis, but that is for another post), so someone ignoring an e-mail normally wouldn’t cause me to write a post about it, but, sometimes there is an e-mail you should do something about.

My oldest, who is going to University in the fall got an e-mail last week, that she didn’t act on, and it may end up costing me (potentially) a large sum of money.

What Teenager Doesn’t Check Their E-mail?

That’s a darn good question, and the cost of it, is about 1/2 the cost of lodgings at University next year (and more) from what I can estimate, thanks to one of my children not checking her e-mail in the past 2 weeks or so (or at least not checking this e-mail in specific).

Evidently the University she is planning to attend this fall (if she passes all of her courses in high school) has a large 1st year class arriving in this coming academic year, so the residence board is worried they will not have enough rooms for all of the students who might want to live in Residence, thus they have devised a brilliant plan (IMHO) to deal with this.

One of their existing residence building has fairly large single rooms, so what the school will be doing is putting Bunk Beds into these larger rooms so two students can sleep and live where one would have been previously, which should help alleviate some of the over crowding problem.

The University’s housing folks are smart enough that they could simply force this on to their incoming first year students but that might cause some hard feelings, so instead they turned this problem into an opportunity so they devised a deal to make this an attractive choice, instead of a stop gap fix to their over crowding problem. The solution is ingenious, they sent out an e-mail to students going into first year that made the following offer:

1. Any first year student who volunteers for one of these bunk bed rooms, would only have to pay 1/2 of the normal residence lodging fees (excluding food). That in itself makes it a very attractive deal, but they weren’t finished.
2. In addition any student who is in one of these rooms, gets a free laptop computer and the residence will be set up with wireless Internet, due to the rooms being crowded and maybe not having enough space to study or work. There will be study areas set up to allow for these students to have  a work place somewhere near their rooms.

Great deal, don’t you think? I thought so when my oldest told my wife and I about it on Monday night, after my daughter finally checked her e-mail, however, the deal had been sent out on the previous Thursday and evidently by Friday morning all the spots and volunteers needed had been filled, so we missed out on this deal.

Did we really lose all that money? Not really, but it does go to show that sometimes you should check your e-mail a little more often than once every 2 weeks or so. Lessons we learn in life are never easy, and they always seem to have a large monetary value of some kind, unfortunately.

This weekend we finally tried out the Rogers Pay Per View system (to watch Michael Clayton, which I’d seen 8/9 of on an airplane but never saw the ending), and it worked just fine. I was impressed by the fact that I actually can watch it again for 48 hours (it cost $5.99).  We got this digital box a year ago, when Rogers effectively gave it to us for free (or 50 cents more a month), and it has been quite good and we have used it to my satisfaction.

Comparing the pay per view system to Blockbuster or another video store, I think this service seems fine. Was it worth $5.99 for the movie, this time yes, but I don’t think I’ll end up using it a lot. I still get most of my movies from the Ottawa public library, but I may rent one more movie in the next little while, but not too many more, I just don’t see the value, if I can get the movie for free from the Library.

University Costs and So It Begins

As my daughter has made a choice about which University to attend, now I must start spending money. I had to put down a deposit on a residence room, and all the fees I had to pay previously just to apply to the University, to have the privilege to send them more money later.

I will have to make a run to the school, which is going to cost enough, so my daughter can see the campus before she starts in September.

I have created a new category in Quicken to track all these expenses. Why? I am a masochist at heart, I guess.