Investing and Personal Finance
From the monthly archives:
Earlier today, I published a You Need a Budget review – budget software to help you organize your finances. I have set up a special coupon code with YNAB so that if you want to purchase this software you can save 10% off the purchase price.
To get the discount just go to the [...]
{ 0 comments }
In this post I’ll be reviewing the budgeting tool called “YNAB” which stands for “You Need a Budget”. There are quite a few financial software tools available on the market such as Microsoft Money (discontinued) and Quicken, so it can be difficult to sort out which tools (if any) are right for you. YNAB is [...]
{ 8 comments }
Eaton’s was a famous Canadian department store which was famous for it’s catalog, being a pioneer in having a “no haggling” policy and for its slogan “Goods Satisfactory or Money Refunded.” Combined with the Eaton’s reputation, this provided a powerful guarantee to customers: either they’d be satisfied with a purchase, or they would get their [...]
{ 2 comments }
Whenever I’ve tried to figure out how much someone should contribute to an RESP for their child – I’ve always gotten stuck on the issue of whether the kid lives at home during his school years or goes to school out of town. My rough calculations indicate that if you contribute the maximum allowed each [...]
{ 4 comments }
There’s probably a decent chance this post will make you angry. Feel free to skip it if you want to stay in a good mood. If you decide to read it anyway and are looking for ways to vent your anger, insulting the author (Mr. Cheap) or announcing that you’ve unsubscribed to our feed are [...]
{ 24 comments }
My recent post about Working With Canadians generated some interest (and discussion), so I figured I’d move forward with a second post on a related subject.
Much like the previous post, my goal isn’t to provide a perfect profile of every techie (generalizations, by their very nature, don’t hold for every member of a group). Instead [...]
{ 24 comments }
One suggestion for saving money that I’ve read on countless websites is to participate in free (or very cheap) activities that are happening in your community. Things like festivals, open houses etc are good examples. I’ve never really followed this advice since most “community” events seem to be geared toward people with kids – [...]
{ 15 comments }
I’ve been planning a post on the concept of unintended consequences for the last two years. I keep coming up with different perspectives on it, put off posting, and continually rework it. I don’ t think there’s any way I’ll be able to do the idea justice in under 1000 words, so I going to [...]
{ 9 comments }
In a recent comment, on a very old post (“5 Ways to Make (or lose) Money With Investment Properties – Part 5 – Buying at a Discount”), Awesome asks “i live in Toronto, how and where do I find the deals”. I found this a perplexing question, as the assumption seems to be that there’s [...]
{ 10 comments }
Last year my wife and I took advantage of the ING Direct pre-TFSA deal where they paid extra interest on your pre-TFSA contribution which kind of made it like a TFSA. This year, ING is doing it again – if you have money earmarked for your 2010 TFSA contribution room then you can put the [...]
{ 11 comments }
When I start writing up a wacky business idea, one of the things I do is a quick search to see if someone has already done something similar. I don’t spend hours on it, but I’ll look for 5 or 10 minutes. In many ways it’s surprisingly rare to find someone is already doing what [...]
{ 4 comments }
Stuff White People Like is an amusing blog that mocks the cultural norms of the “educated elite”, a group that often denies having any such norms (yet, we clearly do). Similarly, Canadians both deny having a culture (some Canadians, without a trace of humour, claim they don’t have an accent) and hold particularly trivial things [...]
{ 24 comments }
Google Street View went live today for Toronto, Vancouver, Hamilton, Kitchener, Waterloo, Windsor, Calgary, Canmore, Banff, Lake Louise, Montreal, Quebec city, Halifax. Apparently Saint John NB, Edmonton, Saskatoon and Winnipeg are next on the list.
If you were impressed by satellite images of your rooftop then you will be really blown away by this service. I [...]
{ 14 comments }
Most house or condo owners have experience with doing some sort of do-it-yourself projects fixing up their homes. Maybe this year you wanted to take advantage of the renovation tax credit. Whether you were painting a room, redoing a bathroom or fixing up your deck, you probably noticed that some (or all) projects are hard [...]
{ 11 comments }
When I was growing up, the 80’s cartoons each had standard issue goods guys and bad guys. Autobots battled Decepticons, G.I. Joes battled Cobra, and He-Man battled Skeletor. I think I outgrew cartoons (at least this style of animation) when the villains’ consistent focus on “evilness” began to ring false. The most extreme case of [...]
{ 15 comments }
One of my blogger buddies – Lynnae from BeingFrugal.net highlighted a deal offered in support of the American Cancer Society. After looking at the bundle I bought one for myself since there are several items in there that I was going to purchase anyway. The total retail value of the bundle is $800 although it [...]
{ 2 comments }
I recently finished Atul Gawande’s “Better” and found it interesting and relevant to the personal finance world.
Dr. Gawande is a practising surgeon and in this book discusses how to improve (get “better”) as an individual, organization and industry. He uses medicine as the domain of discussion, but manages to generalize his insights to universal ideas [...]
{ 3 comments }
