Investing My Way To Financial Freedom

Ages

2009-09-10T08:50:00.001-07:00

It has been ages since my last update... A baby will do that...

I am now back into the swing of thing with school starting again and work continuing to keep me occupied. Some recent news is that we bought a condo! The subject removal is today. It is a three bedroom place with 1800 square feet. We got it for $239500, a pretty good deal for a completely updated place! This will continue to take time away from my blogging until our move in date of October 8.

Summer

2009-08-03T10:02:00.000-07:00

Summer has taken me away from the world of the internet! It is strange what happens when you spend time outdoors, you seem to forget your finance blog... I have not forgot about finances just the blog. We have been able to stay very close to our budget this summer. It is a very good thing because last summer things got out of control. Our spending went up and our income went down. This is not a good combination.

This summer spending has remained the same and for the last half of summer income has gone up! This will allow us to pay down our credit card a little faster as well as to start looking seriously at buying a condo. I get a crazy rate of 1.75% because I work at a bank!

The Condo is three bedrooms and about 1200 square feet. The asking price is $239 000 but it has been on the market for over a year. This number may be flexible. It is close to public transportation that will allow me to get all the way downtown in 50 min. This keeps the options open as to where I can find accounting positions once done school.

Passing of a family member...

2009-07-09T08:56:00.000-07:00

I've been out of touch for a while, attending a funeral... Will be back in the swing of things shortly!

Getting back into shape.

2009-06-18T09:35:00.001-07:00

I have started biking a bit again. I now have a little more time in my schedule so that I am able to use my bike instead of my car for transportation. So far this week I have biked home from school once, to work once, and back from work twice! This means I have biked a total of 35KM. It is not much but It is a start.

Our son is growing like a weed. He is smiling a fair bit ever day and is a very happy baby. There was another baby shower recently, our biggest one yet, where we received may gifts. Since we already had a far bit of stuff we retuned many items and got over $200 in gift cards! We will use these to buy things when needed. It will be a great way to reduce costs so that we can continue with our debt repayment.

Speaking of debt repayment, it is going slowly... We have not had the cash flow to be able to pay the VISA down as fast as we have wanted. This month should be a little better as we will finally be getting our child tax benefit and child care benefit. This will include back payments for a total of $700. I will also be getting my bonus from work of around $500. Now it would be nice to put all of this to that VISA but sadly we have a couple of things that need to come first. Our windshield is cracked so we need to pay our $200 deductible. We also need to get an oil change, I should be able to get another free one via mystery shopping, but it does require cash now. We also need some clothing since all of my pants and shorts are falling apart. All of this combined with the two week waiting period for EI that is coming up for the wife's maternity pay will make it so we will be back down to the normal small payment this month of $150.

Visa

2009-06-16T11:01:00.000-07:00

VISA kindly increased my credit limit by another $2,000...

Garden

2009-06-10T10:35:00.000-07:00

We are lucky enough to have access to a large garden that is shared with many people from our church. We all pout in about $25 for seeds and commit one day every two weeks for gardening. Five or six couples are involved in this and the garden produces enough vegetables for us and our families. All of the food is grown organically with no pesticides or fertilizers.

I figure that we will save about $25/week in groceries once the crop is ready to harvest. Just a little bit of time and effort gives us a chance to build a community as well as save some money.

Went Camping this weekend

2009-06-08T16:40:00.000-07:00

The first time out camping this year was a blast! We were with a larger group of people that we enjoy hanging out with. On Saturday we went for a short hike that included over 200 stairs! At the bottom of the stairs there is a nice set of rapids to relax by. A couple of us decided to go swimming! Yup it was very very cold, snow runoff will do that...

This week I am back to a crazy school schedule again, another midterm and some large projects are really taking their toll. My accelerated accounting class will be done in a couple of weeks, this will make my life a lot less stressful. We have been very good at sticking to our budgets recently, vary little going out and making great tasting low cost meals at home! Our $100 a week budget for food and entertainment has allowed us to go out a couple of times and we were able to save up for this camping trip!

Unlike last summer we will not be increasing our weekly budget to $200 due to our tight financial situation and our drive to pay off the VISA card. It is now at $3700 down from a high of $6200 in January.

I have now transferred a total of $40 with TD's Simply save to my TFSA.

A Job

2009-06-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

I should be complete my BBA come Christmas. I am not sure what I will be doing after this point, jobs at accounting firms are becoming hard to come by and TD is starting to look more promising. I had my Mid Year Review the other day and we discussed my future at TD. They would really like me to a sales position with the bank, this job would start just under $40,000 a year not including bonuses. Bonuses could range from $2,000 to $8,000 a year depending on branch sales and my individual performance. Some other perks I get with any job at TD are free banking, no fee mutual funds, a pension plan, and discounts on loans/mortgages.

If I got an entry level job with an accounting firm I would start off around $35,000. I am not sure what the bonus structure is at accounting firms. Being an accountant I will have a multitude of options to further my career without limiting myself to the banking industry.

It is a hard decision to make and I know that both will allow me to make a decent living. For now I will continue to do some extra training at TD when it is offered to me. At the end of summer I may get my mutual fund certification! Hopefully by fall I will have a better Idea of what I want out of my career.

TD Earnings

2009-05-28T10:28:00.000-07:00

The company I work for, TD, released its earnings today. Net income dropped by $234 million compared to this quarter last year. The drop can be attributed to the slowing economy as well as increased loss provisions. The increase in loss provisions lowers the net income of TD. TD is still a very healthy bank with just over 10% of tier 1 capital. Tier 1 capital is essentially the hard capital that is held in reserve. This reserve allows TD to cover any unexpected losses from a turbulent financial market.

The key figure I care about from any TD report is the dividend. This quarter TD will be issuing a dividend of $0.61 per common share. This is unchanged from the last two quarters. Since I own TD shares from my employee stock plan I am quite happy with the continued and steady dividend. The Dividend is set to automatically reinvest into TD stock upon payment, this way I get a 1% discount on the TD stock price!

A little update on my TD Simply Save. I use my debit card a lot! I have tried to cut back the number of uses so I do not spend as much money. It is harder to buy a $1.50 coffee when you know $2.50 will come out of your account. I have transferred $19 since last Thursday! This is all put into my TFSA where I earn a whipping 1%. When there is a more substantial amount in this account I will buy some TFSA mutual funds.

The weekend is here!

2009-05-23T10:19:00.000-07:00

That day has finally come, I have a saturday off work. I actually have a weekend. Sadly all of my free time is going towards school work and cleaning our house. These things need to get done.

I have just set up my Simply Save service with TD Canada Trust. You will be hearing about this starting next week. It is a program that transfers $0.50-$5.00 into your savings account every time you use your debit card! I have elected to do $1.00. To kick off this new program TD is going to give you $10 for every $100 that you transfer with simply save. The promotion caps at $200 over the next year that TD will give you. I think it is a fun tool that will help many people to save incrementally without having to think about it. You can use the program to snowflake many accounts with multiple simply saves!

The Coming Week

2009-05-19T14:53:00.000-07:00

This week is looking to be very busy. My work is having a baby shower for our son tomorrow night, after the shower I will be visiting with my Mom who is visiting form out of town. I also have shifts at work wed, thurs, and fri. Then on saturday my sister comes in from out of town to see her nephew. She will be staying two nights and will be attending another baby show that is put on by one of our friends on sunday night!

Needless to say this on top of my three classes and a baby will completely fill up my time, busyness seems to always happen in spring!

Taxes

2009-05-10T09:51:00.000-07:00

A comment on my previous post asked how I have got into doing taxes, and where I learned the skills to do so. Other than my courses that I have taken towards my BBA in accounting I have some work experience that has helped me tremendously in figuring out how to do taxes.

I worked for Intuit in their QuickTax support team. This gave me a great base of knowledge about how the Canadian tax code works as well as the computer skills needed to complete tax returns. For 90% of people these are surprisingly easy and you can do it yourself with QuickTax Online.

Because I am a small tax preparer I use this software to complete the returns I do for others. It costs me only $13.00 per return that I complete. If i were to use the professional version called profile it would cost $25.00 per return until I have done enough returns to cover the $400.00 cost of the software. In other words I will need 31 clients to recover break even on cost with the professional version.

The best thing about using quicktax online is that you do not need to pay until you want to file your return! Give it a try at www.quicktax.ca. Or you can contact me to do your next Canadian tax return. It is never too late to file, failing to file your return is against the law.

canadianfinanceguy at gmail dot com

Tax Returns

2009-05-08T07:53:00.000-07:00

This tax year I have been helping others do their tax returns. This has turned out to be very lucrative for the amount of time that I have put in. I charged $33 per return completed and my costs for the software was $13 per return. Each tax return too about 20 minutes to complete. This tax season I completed 9 returns for a total profit of $180 for about three hours of work. I know my rates are crazy low so next year I will have a proper business plan along with business cards. This will be accompanied with a new fee of $40 per return.

I will be attempting to line up clients throughout the year in order to get the maximum number of returns in. I am hoping to get 50 people signed up, this will give me just over $1300 in my pocket less taxes. This client base will also allow me to offer financial advice to assist people in getting out of debt. I have been working on this for a long time and I believe I can offer assistance to people i order to live their lives in a financially responsible way.

Low Interest Rates

2009-05-03T05:57:00.001-07:00

If you are buried in high interest debt you should be looking into different debt instruments in order to speed the debt repayment process and to reduce your cost. Some departments store credit cards have interest rates up to 29%. This is outrageous! Most traditional credit cards have a interest rate around 19%, still outrageous. There are a variety of low interest cards out there that have decent rates around 10%. Or if you have a good credit score you can get a line of credit with rates as low as 5%.

I have made a chart on how much money you could save by changing your funds to lower interest debt instruments. This exaple is if you have $10,000 in debt and you want to pay it off in five years.

It is crazy to see how much money you are throwing away by keeping balanced on the high interest cards, why not transfer the balance to low interest cards or other low interest debt tools.

Home

2009-04-28T15:26:00.001-07:00

Everything is going well with our son. He is healthy and growing! My parents visited us fort he weekend and helped out a fair bit. They also bought us diapers and some toys. THe diapers will save us around $100 is expenses over the next two months. It is very helpful when family members give cash and items that you will be going through such as diapers and wipes. All of the larger stuff gan be bought on craigslist for a fraction of the price so I kinda feel bad when someone buys something new for $60 when you could have got it for $10, but everything helps.

My parents also finally got the contact information for someone who was calling relentlessly from Wells Fargo. This made me a little worried that there was an outstanding debt that I was not aware of. I talked to them today and all they wanted to do was offer me a $10,000 unsecured line of credit! Like I need more debt...

Baby

2009-04-23T07:49:00.000-07:00

On monday April 20th we had our baby! We just got home today as the baby was delivered by c-section. I should be back posting shortly>>>

Quick Trip

2009-04-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

We had a quick trip to the hospital the other night. The contractions were getting worse and closer together for my wife. We arrived at 11PM and after being checked out the midwife thought that it would be a good idea to stick around for a while to see if anything changes over the next four hours. ... Nothing changed.... We came back home very tired. I know it will happen soon but the excitement is making it very hard to be patient.

I have been very bad at entering information into my personal finance program recently. Once I get my AMEX bill I will be able to enter all of the data from last month. I will then post a update. I am looking forward to my net worth increasing dramatically since the beginning of January. This is for the sole reason of a large tax return.

We are in the process of re budgeting everything in order to accommodate the baby and the increased costs and income associated with the little one.

Late

2009-04-14T07:40:00.000-07:00

Well the baby is officially late. This is not surprise as it is our first. The due date was yesterday and there was no birthing happening. I am okay with this as it gives us a little more time to get prepared, I still have to clean some more...

We went out for Indian food in Langley last night. Since we have moved back from London we have not found an Indian restaurant that we really like, but this one looks like it could be our regular Indian food place. The prices are great, we both ate for $25 including the tip! We only drank water to keep the tab down.

I have my last class of school today. Thank goodness I only have three final exams to worry about.

Easter Weekend

2009-04-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

With classes just about over and all of my major projects handed in I will actually be able to enjoy this weekend! I have today off to just sit and relax. Tomorrow I have a short shift at the bank and then in the evening we are off to the in laws for turkey dinner! Sunday will be another day of relaxation... and then monday it is back to work for me.

These are the plans as of now. Anything can change at a moments notice as my wife is due to have our baby on monday. As you know the babies are never predictable as to when they arrive. This will be our first child and we are both very excited.

We have been hitting craigslist for the majority of our baby needs. This has saved us thousands of dollars. From the crib we got for $50 to the bags of clothing for $5. If you are not picky about what you want colour wise then craigslist is the way to go. We have also received allot of gifts from friends and family. Baby showers are great fundraisers.

Mutual Funds

2009-03-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

I hold some mutual funds that I have had for around eight years. They have preformed fairly well up until this latest little downturn. The overall value of the mutual funds has now dropped just below my average cost per unit. I used this opportunity to transfer the mutual fund into the new tax free savings account (TFSA). This way I will be able to receive all of my dividends and increase in value on the account with no tax implications!

Since I made the change to the new account two weeks ago my mutual funds have increased five percent in value. It makes me happy to know that I will be able to keep all of that increased value if I choose to sell. I have also decided that while I am in school I will be putting $50 a month into this account in order to get some extra money socked away for the purchase of a house.

We have been looking at condo's or small houses in the 2-300,000 range. This will get us a decent size three bedroom home. It is a nice goal to look forward to and it motivates me even more to finish school and to find a job.

Car Insurance

2009-03-27T15:12:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a change in our driving habits, my wife is not working anymore, we were able to reduce our car insurance from 1700 per year to 1550. This is great news! We will be able to put a little more on that credit card. In other credit card news I have been able to get a rate of 3.99% on the $3500 balance until the end of August. This will allow the money that we put on the card to be applied to the principle rather than it being sucked up by interest.

Tax Refund

2009-03-23T07:31:00.000-07:00

Yay! We received our tax refunds in the mail! I will be putting them in the bank and then transferring them directly to our credit card. The $2,700 will go towards paying that crazy card off as well as paying for our $1,700 car insurance bill that is due at the end of this week.

I am a bad blogger

2009-03-19T07:29:00.000-07:00

It has been many days since the last update. School is taking over my life...

I am getting just over $2400 from my tax return this year. This cover my car insurance of $1700 that is due at the end of the month. I pay the entire year just to get it out of the way. The rest of the money goes to the visa. It has been slow going paying this thing down since my wife has been on medical leave due to pregnancy and no EI cheques have come in yet. They are saying that we will be getting back paid when the money comes in by the end of the month. It looks like we will be getting $399 a week from this, thus our budget is going to need to be followed very closely if we are going to survive.

I should be getting more hours in the second half of summer as I will only be in two classes for July and August. May and June I will be in three classes one of which is accelerated.

And Yay for the Canadian Dollar recovering a bit and the TSX going up up and up last week!

It is laundry day!

2009-03-06T12:59:00.000-08:00

Yay today is laundry day... It is a good way to kill a couple of hours if you are bored... Too bad I am not bored. I wish I was bored so that I could actually be excited for this.

Coping.

2009-03-03T06:59:00.000-08:00

I have entered everything that I need to get done for school into my iCal. This lets be visually map out what I will be working on and when it needs to get done by. This system works well for me so that I am able to accomplish small goals in short periods of time. this also seems to give me more free time because when I am done the task alloted I no longer need to think about what I need to do next, I can just relax!

On another note Apple just released a new mac Mini and new pricing for its iMac line today. It is really tempting to get one of these... Only if I did not have all of this debt I would be able to use the tax refund to get myself a flashy new desktop...