Computer Perils
So the cogitations and expletives that have been expounded by me in the past few days have been due to my computer being sick. The hard drive crashed yesterday, but luckily not too badly. I will now spend a day or two cleaning up my system, due to my pack rat software installations.
What does this have to do with Financial Planning? I run Quicken on this machine and I have most of my excel workbooks for finance here as well. If this computer had died with no back up, I would have been SUNK. When was the last time you backed up your computer(s)? If you are doing anything on line for your financial well being, you might want to think about that one.
Long Term Mortgage Rates Going Up
If you haven’t locked in long term, it is going to cost you more today to get a long term Mortgage. Most of the major banks are guessing that interest rates will go up in the long term, so they are raising their long term rates to hedge against this. Long term bond yields have been up, and inflation is still above what the bank of Canada wants, so they may be right.
A Sea of Red
No, not my finances, the Liberals rolled to power again in Ontario. What does this mean? Well I think it means John Tory is as much a success running the Provincial PC Party as he was CFL Commizar. Four more years of Mr. McGuinty, wonder if he’ll start off his new term the way he did the last one (with a massive Tax increase)?
How much for a new house?
Well if you don’t live on the Prairies, your new house price is slowing a great deal, however, if you do live on the prairies, that is another story. Where I live the increase is less than inflation, so that is cool, but in Saskatoon, over 50%?!? Holy crap!
| New Housing Price Indexes | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2007 | August 2006 to August 2007 | July to August 2007 | |||
| (1997=100) | % change | ||||
| Canada total | 155.1 | 6.5 | 0.4 | ||
| House only | 165.1 | 6.0 | 0.6 | ||
| Land only | 135.6 | 7.8 | 0.1 | ||
| St. John’s | 137.8 | 4.5 | 1.2 | ||
| Halifax | 139.8 | 7.0 | 0.1 | ||
| Charlottetown | 117.8 | 0.2 | 0.0 | ||
| Saint John, Fredericton and Moncton | 114.4 | 0.8 | 0.6 | ||
| Québec | 148.0 | 3.9 | 0.7 | ||
| Montréal | 155.3 | 4.5 | 1.1 | ||
| Ottawa–Gatineau | 162.0 | 1.1 | 0.2 | ||
| Toronto and Oshawa | 141.7 | 2.4 | 0.4 | ||
| Hamilton | 148.5 | 3.1 | -0.7 | ||
| St. Catharines–Niagara | 151.7 | 4.3 | 1.1 | ||
| Kitchener | 139.7 | 1.9 | 0.3 | ||
| London | 138.4 | 3.2 | -0.1 | ||
| Windsor | 103.0 | -2.8 | 0.7 | ||
| Greater Sudbury and Thunder Bay | 106.3 | 4.1 | 0.4 | ||
| Winnipeg | 168.9 | 16.0 | 0.5 | ||
| Regina | 201.8 | 29.2 | 5.3 | ||
| Saskatoon | 212.1 | 53.6 | 1.4 | ||
| Calgary | 248.9 | 6.1 | 0.0 | ||
| Edmonton | 248.4 | 30.2 | 0.4 | ||
| Vancouver | 122.4 | 6.6 | 0.1 | ||
| Victoria | 118.7 | 0.4 | 0.0 | ||
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In the days of cheap hard drives, CD’s, DVD’s, Tapes, USB Keys, Flash Memory, Diskettes (I know, antiquated), Online Storage, NAS Drives . . . if you don’t have backups of important data, you don’t deserve to have your important data on the computer.
Also, you should look in to having a dual hard drive system. Even if you don’t RAID them, set up a scheduled task that copies your data from one drive to the other every night.
Heck, even if you have two computers and a router/switch/hub you can set each one to back up their data to the other one very easily.