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Last Saturday Post

Just wanted to let everyone know that there won’t be any more Saturday posts for at least a couple of months.  I’m going to be doing a lot of traveling and with the new baby it’s just too difficult to commit to it.  It will come back at some point but probably just once a month.  This won’t affect the normal posts during the week since I can plan and write them in advance when it’s convenient for me.

What do you readers think about the Saturday post?  Is it worthwhile?  Useless?  Somewhere in between?

For that matter – I’d love to hear from any readers who have any thoughts on our posting schedule – do we post too much?  not enough?  Do you want higher quality posts?  (that last question was a joke).

Only one link – I did a guest post over on Clever Dude which discusses whether it’s more difficult to go from zero kids to 1 kid – or it is harder to go from 1 kid to 2 kids…

Carnivals

I was in the Carnival of Personal Finance this week hosted by Money and Values.

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No Post Today!

Because of the Victoria Day holiday there is no post today. Check back tomorrow however for more exciting content!

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Saturday LinkStuff, Funny Comments And Weight

Weight was 179.5 pounds this week. Holding steady which is surprising considering my diet hasn’t been stellar. I’ll take it.

Funny comment

This week I did a post on some moronic Toronto parents which generated lots of great comments. Looby was inspired to leave the following comment which I thought was one of the funniest I’ve read:

True story with a Vancouver twist: my friend and I were in a store when a loud voice from the doorway proclaimed “a little help with my stroller, thank you” aimed generally into the store. As we were nearest we went over to see what assistance she needed, only to discover her baby was in fact a white poodle, with bows.
The truly depressing aspect is that I have lived here long enough to not even be surprised but I sincerely hope she never has any human “children” I imagine she’d be insufferable.
As for children in fancy restaurants, please no, I’d rather find the poodle at the next table.

Articles that I really enjoyed over the last few weeks

Canadian Capitalist wrote that it’s ok to revisit your asset allocation and make changes once in a while.

Million Dollar Journey did an interesting comparison of Canadian vs American retirement accounts.

Thicken My Wallet talks about companies splitting up and the stupidity of Wall Street.

The Financial Blogger gives us a look at a typical day in his life. Let’s just say he keeps busy!

Canadian Dream had a second child as well and has lost track of time. I can totally relate – I find the lack of structure of not working to be extremely unproductive.

My Dollar Plan faces an interesting situation – she has two young kids and would like to work at home. So far she hasn’t given up her day job but she has an option of taking an early retirement package – at age 28! If she’s retired she might have more time to feed her spread sheet addiction! 🙂

The Dividend Guy says that dividend growth is far more important than dividend yield when selecting dividend stocks. Excellent advice. Next question – which companies are going to grow their dividends the fastest?

Middle Class Millionaire is giving up the city life and moving to the country. Good luck with the move.

A big congrats to Ron at the Wisdom Journal and Lynnae over at Being Frugal who both paid off their credit cards. Ron wrote a pretty good post about the myths of credit card debts and I loved Lynnae’s picture of her Citybank credit card which she attacked with a hole punch (and probably a few teeth as well).

The Money Gardener wrote an interesting piece on how to hedge your gasoline stocks with energy trusts. The cool thing about this post is that he actually puts forth a specific plan.

Financial Jungle wrote about Community Lend which is the Canadian equivalent to Prosper and Lending Club. Hopefully it will be more successful than its American counterparts. Lending Club isn’t taking any new lenders and Prosper didn’t renew their advertising on our blog which is clearly a step in the wrong direction.

Where Does All My Money Go wrote about the costs of mutual funds in Canada. This might be entertaining for our American readers to find out how dumb the average Canadian investor is (to pay these fees).

SquawkFox wrote a great piece on buying life insurance and how to be a woman which got linked from Steve Pavlina. I don’t read Pavlina but he has a huge blog.

Brip Blap put together an absolutely brilliant list of ways to simplify your finances. I’m not a big fan of list posts, but sometimes (like this time) they turn out pretty well. I agree with all of his suggestions entirely.

Triaging my way to financial success wrote a piece on a favorite subject of mine – the sub-prime crisis!!

Gather Little by Little wrote a really good post about being bored at work. I can relate to that. Check out the photo as well – it’s a classic.

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Festival of Frugality #125 – Save Some Money If You Are Rich Edition

Welcome to the 125th Festival of Frugality!

We have lots of good posts for you today and we’ll also learn how to save money on some higher-end items – because rich people like to save money too! Make sure you submit another post for next week because my friend Mike, The Financial Blogger is hosting.
lamb.jpg
photo by ArchanaRCars can be very expensive, especially this Lamborghini. I keep seeing a nice black Ferrari that looks like the batmobile driving down my street which is very odd considering it’s probably worth more than most the homes in the area. If I owned a car like that I would save money by washing it myself. I would use the $500/year or so savings and apply it to about two weeks worth of insurance.

Best car washers (editor’s picks)

cottage.jpg
photo by Lost ConnectionOne of the trappings of the extremely wealthy is that they are not restricted to living in one measly house and maybe a crap shack in the country. No, the mega-rich can buy whatever they want, wherever they want. My suggestion for them however is that they try to buy a cottage that is not too far from where they live in order to save gas. Sure it’s nice to have a cottage in France or on the opposite coast, but gas isn’t getting any cheaper!

Best gas jockeys

frenchmaid.jpg
Hired help – we all know how expensive it is to have a full complement of hired help these days, gardener, nanny, cook, butler etc. My suggestion here is to try to hire people who can do more than one job. A cook doesn’t need to be cooking all day so maybe he can cook part time and work in the garden or clean the house for the remainder of the work day.

Best French maids

caviar.jpg
photo by ulterior epicureIf you are entertaining guests on a regular basis then you have probably noticed how the costs of caviar has gone through the roof. For your next get-together, try doing a quick estimate of how many guests you will have, multiply by a reasonable serving per person and only order enough so that you won’t have to throw out thousands of dollars of fish eggs like your last several parties.

Tastiest appetizers

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Happy First Birthday Quest for Four Pillars

One year ago I made my first blog post on my old blog (http://cheapcanuck.wordpress.com) and a few days later on May 16th Mike made his first post on Four Pillars. Since then, we’ve merged our blogs, written a number of book reviews, and posted extensively about retirement planning, real estate investing, asset allocation and dividend investing.

We’ve generated controversy, made some friends in the personal finance blogosphere, and even got a chance to meet Bill Gates! Life always changes, often for the better.

We’re proud of the series that we’ve published, including Mike’s popular Baby Expenses, RESP (which I keep trying to get him to turn into an eBook), and leveraged investing. I’ve posted an overview of buying my investment condo, and the factors that make up the return from a rental property.

Comments and RSS numbers are the coin bloggers get paid in, so we’ve been delighted at the wonderful group of people who have been joining us on a daily basis and responding to our musings on financial topics. They say teachers learn from their students, and it’s certainly been true for me that bloggers learn from their commenters.

While we’re in a reflective mood, we’d love to welcome any ideas for what types of posts you’d like to see more of in the future, or any new types that you’d like us to add to the mix. Please comment on this post or e-mail us.

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Globe and Mail Stats Breakdown (and weigh-in)

If you are a regular reader of the blog then you couldn’t help but notice that we were listed in the Globe and Mail’s “Best of the Blogs” competition this week. Rob Carrick who is the top personal finance journalist in Canada (and clearly a pretty brilliant guy) picked our blog as one of his favourites. This was a big deal for us because it generated a lot of traffic that was not only plentiful but of high quality since it’s fairly likely that some readers of the Globe and Mail Business section would be interested in our blog and will hopefully become regular readers.

One of our long time readers, Guinness416 who has a blog of her own called “Drinkin’ Guinness in the 416” (416 is the telephone area code for Toronto) asked in a comment about the traffic we were getting so I thought it would be interesting to look at all the traffic for that day and see where it all came from.

Traffic breakdown for May 6

Total visits = 2661 This is much higher than our normal daily average of about 900.

Where did all the visitors come from?

  • The Globe and Mail – 1054
  • Search engines such as Google – 497
  • Stumble (social networking site) – 488
  • Three other sites that were mentioned linked to us that day and gave us 280 visits – The sites were Canadian Capitalist (129), Dividend Guy (76) and Million Dollar Journey (75).
  • Other sources (blogs, direct etc) – 342

 

In the three days after May 6, we have gotten another 870 visits from the Globe and Mail which is a lot less than the initial day but still pretty good.

So there you have it – if you want some quality traffic all you have to do is get linked by the Globe and Mail!

Weight

The weight was 180.5 pounds. Diet hasn’t been great but I’m going to try to work harder on this.  One of my problems has been too much junk food around the house which is hard to resist after a while.

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Saturday Weigh In and LinkStuff

Weight was 180.5 pounds this week. I bought a double jogging stroller this week so I should be able to go the running more easily since I can take the munchkins with me.

Links

Big congrats to Steve over at Brip Blap who had a new baby this week.

Recently, Finance Freelance Life started a new site called the Finwickian which has a listing of blogs and will eventually have lots of personal finance information. It’s pretty cool – you can check out new blogs or add yours in if it’s not there.  It’s a wiki format so check it out!

Randall from Credit Withdrawal tells a very interesting story from his past which involves, getting fired, having a baby, losing his house but everything worked out really well.

The BagLady talks about some differences between good and bad debt. I left a comment where I basically say that dividing debt into “good” and “bad” is too simplistic since there are varying levels of good and bad. I look at debt as a tool which increases your personal risk. Bottom line is that the more debt you have, the more risk you have and if your debt payments are too high then some of that debt at least is “bad” debt even if the debt is for a income property mortgage or something which is normally considered “good” debt.

I really liked this post which clarifies what is a money coach by Nancy Zimmerman. I have an interest in financial planning and wouldn’t mind doing some sort of financial work in retirement. It’s very difficult to become a proper financial planner without having to sell expensive products and services so perhaps being a “money coach” might be a possibility. Nancy’s blog is very interesting and is worth checking out.

Carnivals

Carnival of Personal Finance was hosted by Lazy Man.

Carnival of Everything Finance was hosted by….Everything Finance – what a coincidence!

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PhD Announcement

As I’ve wrote about before, I’ve applied to do a PhD. I was very fortunate that I was accepted at the two schools I was most interested in. After a tough decision, I’ll be officially starting at the University of Waterloo in the fall (and moved there last weekend to do some research assistant’s work through the summer).

One of the big pluses will be that I’ll be fairly close to Toronto, so I can come back whenever I hear Mike has some beer that needs drinking. My condo has been pretty hands off, but it will also be nice to be within striking distance if I need to do anything there.

My supervisor has a tendency to push students through quickly, so I may be Dr. Cheap as early as 2012 (which, really, is just around the corner).

Many, many thanks to Wooly Woman and Larry MacDonald who let me pick their brains via e-mail (Wooly Woman was good enough to even read over my application!), to everyone who has commented on my related posts and the people I’ve talked to “in real life”.