This is where your finance takes place

Here are the good read for this week:

American Consumer News wrote an interesting article on how to save money at the grocery store. With the price of oil going up every day, this is probably the place in my budget where it went up the most!

Debt Free is trying to explain the cause of the US humongous debt. I was happy to find out that the department of defense was not the most important expense in the US. Only the third one…. with 575… BILLIONS! WTF? I think Canada didn’t reach this amount even if we add the last 100 years expenses in the defense department!

Dual Income no Kids are writing about the difference between a second mortgage and a PMI (Private Mortgage Insurance). With my banker experience, I would say that it is easier (but much more expensive) to get a PMI. Second mortgage offered by financial institution will be more expensive than a first mortgage but still affordable

The Personal Financier offers a good reflexion on Privatization. Since I live in a province where several things are run by the government (education, health care, roads and transportation), we are tempted to believe that privatization would be the ultimate solution to our problems. After seeing Sicko, I changed my mind!

In a time where the stock market isn’t going so well. Some people are hiding behind good paying dividend stock. The Dividend Guy write about signs that will tell you when a company potentially drop its dividend.

Thicken My Wallet point out the fact that several people are dependent from a Blackberry and ask if those people should be paid to look over their emails after work hours? I think it is up to employees to set their own limit. On the other side, I don’t think an employer should expect them to work for free… unless the blackberry is given with a specific mandate. Then, it’s up to the employee to refuse

Carnivals:

Carnival of Personal Finance

Carnival of Careers

Carnival of Debt Reduction

Festival of Frugality

Carnival of Everything Finance

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The first post of this series was about honesty and integrity. While this is not a characteristic that will make your financial planner performs, it is the very basic of a financial relationship. Today I will write about pro-activeness and how it should be demonstrated.

Most financial advisor will claim their pro-activeness since it is something highly requested in the financial industry. We want a consultant able to read our mind and offer us products according to our needs. But be careful, most salesmen look like they are being pro-active and they just want to sell the latest flavour of the month in the financial world.

When I am talking about pro-activeness, I am talking about validating my needs before I express them. For example, if your banker (hopefully, he is a financial planner) offer you to do a retirement plan for free. This is what I call pro-activeness. You know that he won’t make a penny on this kind of work but he will still do it because your good is important for him.

A good sign that your financial advisor is pro-active would be that he is offering financial solutions that are not necessarily the most advantageous for him. For example, if your consultant is looking for your monthly charges on your bank account, you know that he is really working for you and he is not waiting for you to complain in order to take action.

Regularly follow-up is definitely another sign of pro-activeness. You are dealing with this individual for a specific reason; you want him to manage your money. Therefore, unsolicited follow-up such as a call when you receive your financial statements or when there is big news in the market would be appreciated.

This quality will bring you an additional piece of mind and an assurance that your money is managed actively. This will obviously not going to guarantee that you are going to make more profit, but at least somebody will be able to tell you before you get your financial statement.

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I was quite happy to put a few extra bucks in my monthly budget and look at my $1,500 project. For those who just joined, I am trying to create extra cash flow in the amount of $1,500 in order to cover my wife’s income so she can stay home and take care of the kids. By the way, this is a decision we both made knowing all the sacrifices it occurs.

Since my last update in January, I was missing roughly $1,200 to get to my goal of $1,500. While not being impressive, that $300 was created in only three months. The problem is that I was running out of ideas after that. This is where I made the choice of changing job by keeping the same based salary but with higher expectation in term of bonus. I obviously can’t take into consideration future bonuses since I am new in this industry and the amount could really fluctuate from years to years.

We have been making progress in term of children clothes and other expenses related to our children (my son does not wear diapers anymore and the little one started drinking regular milk). I didn’t count everything so I was quite happy to see the end result.

Unfortunately, at the same time, we received our children allocation update for the upcoming year. Since we made more money last year than the previous years, the government is cutting down on my allocations based on the fact that I am making too much. We are never making too much money

On top of that, I had to review my gasoline expense since the oil barrel keeps going up! I used to put $50 a week and we are now at $60.

So basically, my raise and my new frugal habits only helped us to maintain our budget after the cuts from the government and the increase of the price of gas.

But there is still hope!

The web company I recently created is already making money online with a few website and we should be able to withdraw $300 per month each (me and my partner) shortly. That would be a great step in creating passive income. I would be happy if we could get $500 a month each at the end of this year. I would be half way to my main goal of $1,500. A good bonus and I could be set ;-D

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