I’ve had lots of reading material which I DO hope to be able to conquer while I’m south so I thought it may be a good idea to keep you guys in the loop with some of the more interesting articles I’ve found, so here goes:

Extreme Couponing – I did not know that Walmart accepted multiple coupons.. this is huge for me… I’ve heard about this before as I know London Drugs is famous for allowing this type of thing (coupon stacking). Basically you can use multiple coupons coming from different coupons and stack them up to save big. Everything from food to appliances such as a humidifier, if you have a coupon for $0.50, then another for $1.00 off the same item.. add them together and get the item while it’s on sale – you can save a ton! Such as this lady who just bought $1100 worth of groceries for $40.

The Best Financial Products for Canadians – Well worth a read by Million Dollar Journey, looking for the best personal banking? trading platform? All for Canadians.. nice post!

Those Email Disclaimers mean f-all – from the Economist, basically.. and I didn’t know this, but those email disclaimers that start with “this email was intended…. blah blah”..yah.. means nothing.

How about making your own Vanilla Pudding mix! – you know I haven’t tried many of my great recipes that I’ve posted here, and I think that’s gotta change! Baileys, too late for snow ice cream, but Baileys, and this, and Baileys.. yumm. (not to mention home made blizzards)

Unfortunately, my mind is remarkably blank as far as radical new products or ideas go – but I can guarantee there are folks out there with lots of great ideas that they could possibly pitch to the Dragons.. and guess what? They’re coming back to PEI!

On March 17th according to the Dragons Den website, they will be coming to CBC PEI in the lobby doing auditions.. got any great ideas? Hell, got any great ideas that you don’t want to act on? A great new industrial product, time saver, or perhaps some sort of unique baby gifts? Let me know and I’ll pitch it for you! ha ha ha.

RBC (my main chequing account bank) is about to launch an iPhone app which will allow me to pay bills via my phone. This may sound like an application that you’d only use for viewing balances or something – but I have an idea which seems to make sense (in my head at least).

Ever since I started budgeting and really getting a grip on my finances, I no longer spend money that I don’t know I’m spending. I watch my bank account daily, and also track my spending. So what I plan on doing, is pay everything with my credit card – and when I have two seconds, simply transfer the money from my bank to the credit card. Bill payments are free via RBC, so why not take advantage?

Which brings me to my next point.. why would someone want to go through this process? Easy.. Free Rewards!! I have an "Air Miles" Mastercard and I would have to guess that every year I get approximately $200 to $300 worth of free groceries just from whipping out the Air Miles card at Sobeys and also by my Mastercard purchases such as my home heating oil, some urban clothes, online purchases, etc.. Previously, I’d avoid using my Mastercard for most purchases as I didn’t want to use it if I didn’t have to, and sometimes I’d forget to make the payment immediately for the purchases I just made when I eventually did sit at a computer – this way I don’t have to!

Yes, hypothetically I could do the exact same thing now by using the web browser on my phone and such, but putting in all my login information and trying to navigate around on the tiny screen would be kind of a pain to do it on any regular basis, so I’m really looking forward to the launch of their iPhone app – I’ll be doing a full review of the application on the blog once it’s launched

Liz had decided to go to the Flea Market with her friend last Sunday and she bought two tables at $12 each. We packed up the cars Saturday night with all kinds of junk which I honestly didn’t think we could have gotten any money for at all, well, I suppose there were a few items amongst the crap which I knew would sell for a few dollars, but not much. In any case my car (hatchback) was full to the brim and we had Liz’s car pretty full as well and headed out at 8AM Sunday morning to the old North River rink to sell our crap.

Well it didn’t take me long to realize that she was likely going to have some luck here.

We hadn’t even entered the building when someone was offering to buy one of the items we were carting in. There were another two people (other sellers) that actually followed us walking right next to the cart scanning our items a full two hours before the market was open for business. During my second trip in with a cart-load, Liz actually sold an item to a co-seller marking our first sale ($5 for some old toilet strattle shelf thing).. I mean seriously, this thing was a cheaply made Zellers purchase for about $10 on sale new and here we got $5 for it? It had rust on it! I couldn’t believe it.

So I left Liz for a few hours to catch up on some sleep and play some hockey while she peddled our crappy wares at the Flea Market. I took my own car back (which has more storage room) and told her that she wasn’t allowed to bring home more than what would fit in her car – and if she did have extra stuff, drop it off at the red bins somewhere to donate the clothes as they aren’t coming back into the house.

Turns out that Liz had turned our bunch of junk destined for the garbage or landfill – into a profit of over $150!! This is after she paid for the tables and paid back her ‘float’ of coins and change. What an AWESOME way to clear out the old stuff we had! Now usually I would say that with the money we should save it or put it away or something like that, but honestly – this is bonus money, we’re going to spend it doing something fun or maybe go have a nice dinner out to celebrate the Flea Market. I’ve had my eye on a new 23” monitor which I’d love to have for touching up pictures and keep the other display as well – but we’ll see if that happens – they are getting cheaper all the time .. tempting.

So, bottom line… if you’ve got a bunch of trunks and stuff of old clothes or toys or games or anything really.. sell it at the Flea Market – you’re not using it.. let someone else, and get some money at the same time.

I can remember like it was yesterday the message I received from my brother when he told me that I was now an uncle.. it was short and to the point, he told me his name.. his age.. and that he’d call me later It was during that walk that I decided that as the cool uncle I am, I would help save for his education.

For the next 52 weeks – or 26 paychecks, I put $50 into a savings account – During his next birthday I told them that I had saved up $1300 to start Gabe’s education. Obviously very excited about that, other members of my family have started to chip in as well.

Using my handy compound interest calculator – I have found that after 18 years of growth with no other contributions, that $1300 will turn into $7,227.89 at 10% interest. I’m happy to report that I’m also at year 2 and with the other contributions from family (a total of $1670 CAD) – “Gabe Account” as I call it.. now stands at $2200 CAD.. this is $178 past my 10% per goal year… I could actually stop trading for a year and still be on track. And the best part about compound interest? Well now the account stands to be at over $10,000 by the time he hits 18.. that would certainly help!

CESG

You know what else would help? Free money!! We give the government a lot of money off our paychecks every year.. wouldn’t it be nice if they gave us a little back? Well – you can, and they will. The CESG program (Canada Education Savings Grant) will do just that. How much can you get?

Direct from the CESG website:

On the first $500 you save every year in your child’s Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP), the Canada Education Savings Grant will give you:

• up to $200, if your net family income is $40,970 or less
• up to $150, if your net family income is between $40,970 and $81,941, or
• up to $100, if your net family income is more than $81,941.

When you save more than $500 annually, the Canada Education Savings Grant could add up to $400 on the next $2,000.

The maximum amount of grant per child is $7,200.

CLB

There is ALSO the CLB program. This is the Canada Learning Bond and it’s even better in that it’s just given to you no questions asked. From the CLB portion of the canlearn.ca website.

• Your child could get $500 NOW to help you start saving early for your child’s education after high school, and an extra $100 each year up to age 15. That’s up to $2,000 (plus interest) in bonds for your child’s education. And you don’t have to put any of your own money into the RESP to get this bond.
• An extra $25 will be paid with the first $500 bond to help cover the cost of opening an RESP.

HOW DO I DO IT? IS IT HARD?

Here are the steps you have to follow:

1. Open up an RESP with your child as the beneficiary (or children.. you can have family RESP’s as well)
2. Contribute money to it
3. Apply for CESG/CLB and enjoy free money
4. Withdrawal money when children go to post-secondary education.

Pretty simple eh? I would personally suggest going with Questrade for your RESP as they are a low fee discount brokerage. Meaning every time you want to buy a fund, etf, stock, whatever.. you won’t be charged stupid ass fees – thereby maximizing your savings. If you do go with Questrade – put in the referral code 0e40be5a as that will tell them I sent you. In all honestly I don’t know how much that would help me or you, but I know it’s worth something.

If you have ANY questions on this process, please feel free to comment below.. I like helping people get free money.. especially for their kids!

The first thing I will say is that I had the right attitude I was determined that I was going to change my spending habits. I didn’t go into it thinking it was going to be done overnight, nor did I think that it was going to be easy. Some of the ideas that I tried didn’t work, while others I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of before.

Budget

I tried to budget all my money, it didn’t work. While I did use a budget to have a rough idea of where I stood and how much I was going to pay on my line of credit and credit cards, I didn’t stick to a budget. What I did do, was figure out where the hell my money was going, almost down to the penny. I also created a Google Calendar which displayed for me every day/month, etc when bills were due and how much they were. I posted about the benefits of Google Calendar before and I must say that it is extremely helpful in organizing my financial life.

Poker

While I don’t have the exact figures, I decided that on January 1st, 2010 I was going to give up playing “cash game” poker. What this means is that I would play tournaments if I wanted to and had the money to, but I wouldn’t play any cash games where you basically buy in for whatever (usually $80 or $100) and play with the money in front of me. One hand and this money could be all gone, and unfortunately until I paid off the money that I had already spent (my debt!), I was no longer willing to gamble in this format. This was the toughest habit to break as I used to play quite a bit.

Cut Bills

I examined every bill which came in and all the money that went out – and cut back or saved money where I could. This includes the $200 grocery challenge where myself and Liz budgeted $100 each to eat for the month. Not only do I think this was a great idea – but I also find that this was a very smart idea. We know now if we’re going over our limit and also try to eat the food that we’ve already purchased. This also meant no unnecessary purchases like eating out a lot (we used to eat out 2-3 times a week), no weight loss pills that we were trying to use to supplement exercise, like I say, not much unnecessary.

I also cut down on some monthly bills which I found useless – I was paying for an investment advice service which I never used … gone. I stopped buying coffee every morning and made my own. Those two things alone saved me $60 a month – that’s $720 a year!

Found Ways to Create Income

I would say the biggest reason that I was able to accelerate my debt payments the way I did was due to my new side business of photography. It has far exceeded what I could ever think it could have, it continues to grow and best of all – I love it. Not only did this provide extra income which almost exclusively went to paying off debt – it also kept me very busy as I now spend most evenings working on touching up most of the photos already taken.

Blogging also provides some additional income, however this amount generally covers my webhosting costs as well as donations I make to the PEIHS and Heavenly Creatures.

So unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as inheriting a big lump sum or anything exotic like that – but it certainly can be done. A lot of people wouldn’t bother writing about it and I’m sure there are a lot of people out there whom perhaps think I shouldn’t have wrote about it… but the thing is, this blog also helped me stay on track as well. I wanted to pay off my debts so bad I felt that if I went public about it via my blog, it would help me keep going as I would feel like a moron if I set out to do something publicly and failed due to not being disciplined enough

Ease of Use

As long as I know my username and password, I can make a payment through PayPal – it almost seems too easy, but I guess I’ve had good luck with it so far – so I’ll knock on wood with this one.

Online Payments

Almost all online advertisers and payments can be made to my PayPal account. It’s awesome! In fact my online advertising revenue generally comes in every 2nd Friday just like a paycheck and then for subscription services (which I’ll get into next) just come out of that so it doesn’t touch my bank account.

Subscriptions

This is almost like a saving account – you set it, and forget it. I think it’s great as I make a regular donation (every month) to Heavenly Creatures where I got my Beagles and generally it almost always gets paid by the blog revenue that I host there. Perfect! Skype payments? Comes out of my PayPal account every 2nd of the month. What I like about the subscriptions especially as far as donations go, is that at the end of the year when they send you the donation receipt.. it really adds up!

I feel bad for anyone who wants to try to sell merchant accounts with a competitor like PayPal.

Do you use it a lot? Like it?

Recently my bank (RBC) introduced a finance tracker which allows you to categorize and see exactly where you’re spending your money. For kicks, I decided to see how much my pets are costing me (seeing that I just spent $20 on a dog nail trimmer AGAIN!) and the results were somewhat surprising.

I should also say that they are far from the first bank or financial services company that’s offering a personal finance tracker – the most well-known one out there mint.com has for a few years.. the problem is – it’s only available in the US as of right now, which is really sad as it’s a great service from what I understand. Canada has a number of them as well, but they fail in comparison.

Over the course of the last 3 months – I’ve spent over $400 on my pets. Vet Care accumulated $185 of that, Pet Food was $120, and Pet Insurance racked up $80, the nail trimmer I just bought was another $20.

I don’t even think that includes the big bag of dog food I purchased at the silent auction for a charity for $38.

Wow.. that’s a lot of money!! over $100 a month on the hounds! That’s not even counting the over 2K I spent on Hunters surgeries in January and February. It’ll be interesting to see if they keep my transactions prior to February now as they only usually kept the last 3 months or so. I sure hope they do.

They did a great job in designing the program, it takes usually a day or two for your transactions to appear in the program – but once there, you can quickly categorize them into the things that you purchased or other expenses. I do like to see the large amount paid on loans in my past month graph – it’s so nice to know I only have a few months left carrying that around.

What I found interesting were the little things that added up like the pets that I mentioned above. I also categorized my food down to sobeys/shoppers/superstore, etc. I guess it doesn’t matter whether you’re buying dog food or you’re looking for Ferrari parts for your recently broken down car – it all costs money, and if you don’t keep track, the amounts over time can be staggering.

I know that I’ll be using this budget tracker over time to see where my money is really being spent, but I wanted to post this to let you know that pets can be expensive..

So when I was talking to them, we shared ideas about the most common ways that people sell their stuff. Generally speaking, the ways people do it are:

• flea market – we have a great one in North River which is very busy and people unload a lot of items.
• garage/yard sale – very common this time of year – generally get the least amount of value for your items.. but it’s gone.
• online – UsedPEI/Kijiji/eBay – these types of online classifieds are extremely popular and free (eBay has some seller fees)
• print classifieds – generally for cars and bigger ticket items, I find that this is getting less and less popular as more folks look for deals online.

I haven’t done a garage sale in quite some time, and I can’t remember the last time I actually participated in a flea market. However, I think it’s getting to that point – but I also think that there should be a natural progression in order to get the most ‘bang for your buck’. For the items which are say.. more than $30, I would go online and try to sell it. Stuff like Wii, ps3, computer parts,  In fact even if it wasn’t but it was uncommon or something people would use, I’d still post it on both UsedPEI and Kijiji to see if you could get them sold. If you can’t get them sold that route – gather up your stuff, and head to the flea market. There are people just aching to look over a ‘noob’ stuff at the flea market. If all else fails – garage sale.. and if you can’t ‘give’ it away at that point..junk it.

The reason that I’m writing this today is that I came home yesterday and decided I wanted to sell some Wii items – so I posted our Wii Fit online for $75 (I purchased it used for $100 2 years ago).. I sold it within minutes (using UsedPEI and Kijiji) for full price. Sweet!

Anyhow that quick transaction pretty much convinced me it’s time to purge things – and try to recover some money from them if possible. There really isn’t much point to having something that you use maybe once a year sitting around gathering dust. Especially when you could use that money for other more important things – like paying off the debt you likely used to get it to begin with!

My first update was back in June 2009 and at that time I told myself that I was 12.07 months from being out of debt (keep in mind this is line of credit and credit cards – obviously not mortgage). As with most things, there are obstacles along the way – and with my budget there certainly were some obstacles (Hunters surgeries being two fairly large ones!).

My next update was in July 2009 and at that time I was 9.85 months from being out of debt. Pretty darn good,I can’t quite remember what I was able to do to decrease the amount of debt as quickly in a month – but obviously I had a very inexpensive month.

In September of 2009 I posted another debt repayment update and although I didn’t post how many months were left on my debt, I did post that I had paid off over $3700 of my debt. It’s funny how you accumulate debt by buying things that you want or need to have or purchase, but it’s always such a pain in the neck trying to pay it off eh? In September I had 7.5 months or so left – so I was right on track.

Then came January 2010, which was my last update I’ve posted on my debt repayment. At that time I had paid off $6118 of debt which (at the current pay-off schedule) left me with 6.18 months left to try to get myself out of debt. This was after one of Hunters surgeries (he needed two) and the reason that I mention this is that each surgery was well over $1000 to perform.

This bring me to my update today.. I will call this the May 2010 update since it really doesn’t include June yet.

I am absolutely elated to report that I have paid off almost 82% of my debt since I started almost last year to the day!

Yes, you read that right – Now having said that, I did have a few ‘extra’ payments in there on my debt which I hadn’t originally put in the budget – namely my tax refund which I posted about.

I am so close to being out of consumer or “bad debt” that it’s starting to get exciting. According to my budget schedule – I’m 2 months from getting rid of it. Wow.. what a year!

I can’t wait to write up a wrap up post on how long it took me, how I did it, what changed, what I’m going to do now, etc.. All I know is that whatever the hell I’m doing – it seems like it’s working.