Give Me Back My Five Bucks

I can’t believe 2008 is already over. This year has gone by so fast – and so much has happened! Financially, I think I’ve said it before, but I’m not in the place that I thought I’d be in. According to my NetworthIQ, my networth in January was $18,814, and my networth now at the end of December is $26,695. That’s a difference of $7,881. Not too bad considering I started the year off unemployed, moved twice, made considerably less than I’m used to for the majority of the year, and did a bit of traveling (Detroit/Toronto, Las Vegas, Edmonton, … Continue reading →

I’ve brought my lunch to work every day this month. It was definitely a lot easier than when I did my February-March Lunch Challenge, and I feel a sense of accomplishment. I’d like to start doing these monthly challenges again because they definitely helped me. But they were a lot of work, doing the weekly updates and posting up everybody’s progress. Perhaps if I do it again, instead of posting everyone’s progress, I’ll just write a post asking for updates, and participants can just scroll through the comments to see how everyone is doing. But if I did a monthly … Continue reading →

BF has been teaching me how to play Scrabble. I just assumed I would be good at it, since I’m pretty good at Boggle. But there’s a lot more strategy involved, and the words you have to create are directly affected by what the other players are doing – which obviously isn’t the case in Boggle. I’m getting there, but he’s still better than me for now. :) Since we’re both trying to save money this year, board games are a fun and free way to have fun for hours. We’ve been playing a lot of them lately. What other … Continue reading →

One of the realtors just gave me a belated Christmas card with a $50 bill in it, and a little note thanking me for all my hard work. What a sweet guy. :)

I just checked my RRSPs, and on December 18th, I got $83.93 in re-invested dividends. I get monthly interest from my Money Market and T-Bill accounts, quarterly dividends from 2 other funds, and an annual dividend from another fund. Looking at my portfolio, I am a very conservative investor. Probably too conservative, given my age. In the next few weeks I should look into shifting my portfolio around so that I have less fixed income funds – right now I would say 75% of my money is in MM and T-Bills.