While looking at one of my bank statements recently there were messages stating how everyone with personal and business accounts will have to comply with a new standard in the way cheques are produced as the new ones are more “image friendly”.

You can learn more about it from the Canadian Payments Association site at http://www.cdnpay.ca/ where it outlines everything. I personally had all of my business cheques done awhile ago and so I personally don’t have to worry about this. If you haven’t already you may want to head to your bank and get it over with.

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My last post about the free Ufile tax filing for students got some people asking on what it is like to file your taxes online so I decided to make a post about it. There are quite a few different tax software products that you can use. I personally use Quicktax as that is actually the software that got me interested in filing my taxes online way back. First and foremost as well, you need a NetFile access code which you should have received from the Canada Revenue Agency which kind of looks like this:

Some people that I know had to phone in to get a code initially if they never gotten one before. They don’t even send me those traditional tax package forms anymore since this process saves paper and I have been doing this for years. You first enter in all of your general information such as your name and address.

If you are an employee, then you need to enter in details from your T4 form that you received from your employer.

Self employed people can also use this to report your income as well along with any business expenses that you have incurred during the year.

One good thing about programs like these too is that they offer basic tax advices as well to help you try and take advantage of as many things as possible to ultimately pay as little income tax as possible.

After you finish filling in all of your details, you then save your document and proceed to file your return on the Netfile website.

This is where your four digit access code comes into play as you will need to provide this in order to be able to use Netfile.

Once you do that, you need to attach your tax document which should be saved on your computer and simply submit it online.

That’s it as you are done and from my experience if you are receiving a refund the payment actually arrives fairly quickly within a week or less. So for anyone who is intimidated by this process, hopefully this shows how simple it can be as in my opinion it makes things a lot easier without the hassle of dealing with all those paper forms and calculating things yourself.

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There were a lot of perspectives in this episode where I’m sure a lot of people will be divided on. The two teams objective was to film and create a forty-five second webisode, which is essential a small episodic video show that is distributed online, where the purpose was to promote the cleaning product Soft Scrub.

Team Arrow seemed to have meshed very well it seems this time around. James was the project manager mainly due to him being one of the people who were on the chopping block last week and so this week was his chance to prove himself. While he did not much about film making, he relied on his teammates who were very passionate about it. As he mentions too, this can be a risk but I guess it’s better compared to him doing it having virtually no experience in it. Their webisode molded out as a story of a guy who was going to propose to his girlfriend and before doing so he had to clean the house up with Soft Scrub. Overall it turned out pretty good.

The drama between Muna and Kristine in Team Kinetic was growing even bigger this time around. For example, Kristine wanted Muna to be more involved on the production side that took place behind the camera whereas Muna kept insisting that she would be better in-front of the camera. Kristine eventually decided to simply allow Muna to do the acting. The production was a disaster as during the beginning of the shoot there wasn’t really anyone directing it as Kristine was out doing something else. Muna didn’t seem comfortable at all as her lines sounded like a fast blurb that made the story difficult to follow. Even I am having a hard time trying to remember how the story went. As you can tell, team Arrow won.

A touchy subject came up afterwards as since Team Kinetic lost as usual people began to talk about their thoughts before heading to the boardroom. Muna brought up religious points as she was reading the bible and how she believed that she will succeed in the boardroom with God looking over her. Kristine was reading some literatures that Trump wrote to hopefully find ways to communicate her points to him that he would understand. She then commented about Muna’s way of thinking on how God was not the decision maker in the boardroom and that Trump was. Basically, it looked like she was criticizing Muna for being so religious/spiritual about the situation when she thought that it should be more about down to earth business basics such as highlighting your positives and the other person’s negatives. I’m sure this will generate some heated debated from a lot of people.

In the boardroom another interesting point came up where Kristine was questioned on what happened with apparent blunders such as Muna’s acting and of course details about Muna insisting that she wanted to act in the webisode came up. The comment about that was how depending on how you look at it can be good or bad as simply allowing Muna to do it reduced the possibility of disruption as she could be bitter throughout the entire task and causing the team to be less productive. On the other hand, it could also be seen as a sign of weakness from a leadership point of view as instead of dealing with the problematic person one simply chooses to avoid it and go with the easy route.

That is one subject that I have seen so much personally where you have a high positioned manager or supervisor who instead of dealing with say a loose canon or disruptive person they simply allow them to do as they please as they are afraid to confront them. I’ve never seen this to be a good choice personally as people often see that as favoritism which ultimately costs even more productivity from your team as people tend to respect the person in-charge less. I’ve even seen some pretty ridiculous cases too where the person in charge doesn’t know what to do and despite everyone telling them on how disruptive the person is they still do things such as attempt to promote the person to keep them happy. In their mind, making that person happy so that they won’t cause a negative vibe to everyone else is somehow more effective than setting the person straight and making the rest of the team happy in a fair and consistent way.

Everyone seemed to have had a hard time just giving straight answers on who they would fire when asked the question. Overall, everyone said that they would rather keep Kristine over Muna. While the direction of the webisode played a big role in the loss, Muna made this comment on how she was like a lost sheep, or something along that line, as a way to show how vulnerable and lost she was to justify her acting performance and all. Trump saw right through that and re-emphasized on how he knows that she is a strong person and can’t really say that as if she can’t be held accountable for anything. That seemed to be the key moment as Trump then decided to fire Muna.

This was a very open ended episode I thought where depending on what side of the fence you are on you would probably see things completely different from a business perspective. This is one of the more thought provoking episodes I think so far in terms of determining what a good business decision is in certain situations.

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This is of course only for people within Canada. I was just informed that UFile is allowing students to file their taxes for free online until the April 30th of this year and thought that there may be some people here that would qualify and want to take advantage of it. Simply visit http://www.ufile.ca/home/cfs.asp and follow the instructions which should be pretty straight forward. The person also told me that your income would have to be under $25,000 to qualify as well. Hope that helps.

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I’m not sure how I missed this before as someone just informed me about it. There was this documentary filmed awhile back that was trying to answer a question on how if you simply give people money will it solve their problems? I wasn’t able to find a copy of the video to watch and so instead I watched some brief clips and read a story synopsis of it. The film documentary is called Reversal of Fortune where the film makers followed the life of a homeless person as we see his life of living under a bridge and recycling cans for money. Apparently they actually pre-screened the person by doing things such as a medical exam and so this wasn’t merely say a crazy homeless person.

One thing that got a reaction out of me was how they showed clips of him smoking and drinking a lot of alcohol which in some ways is like he wants to remain poor as while obviously he doesn’t make a lot of money, I’m pretty sure those two habits must cost him a lot every month. I’m guessing this would be truer for him as buying alcohol can be a full day of work for him.

There was a twist to this as during the person’s daily rummaging to find cans to recycle, in one of the garbage bins the film makers placed a suitcase that had $100,000 in it. This was given to the homeless man and he would be able to spend it in any way that wanted. He immediately began to tell friends and family members about his newly found fortune and was confident that he would never be homeless again.

One of the first things that he did with his money was that he gave it to some friends and even purchased a new car for a person he knew from the recycling center. Afterwards, he even bought himself a truck. Just that alone was over $34,000.

He also visits his family and they are all excited about his new fortune. He was also given advice to find a job and to seek financial advice which was provided for free. Instead, he objects to the advice that was given to him and instead kept spending his money on things like smokes, alcohol and playing video games all day. To top it off, he even got married. He basically just kept living a free life and says that he made so many new friends as well and also gave away so much money to others for things such as paying off their debts. In about 6 months, he lost everything. With no real income coming in and continually spending without thinking about the future, he eventually became homeless again. He even mentions how no one wants to associate with him anymore now that he doesn’t have anymore money and that he has more debt than before and is worst off.

Too bad I didn’t actually get to see the full video as it doesn’t seem to be available here, but I think I got the idea of the main story and what happened. I personally think this is so true in general on how just giving people a lot of money does not solve anything as you have to start with the root of the problem. You can even change this to a lot of lottery winners who became instant millionaires and the story is about the same.

Another thing was the comment about making a lot of friends when you have a lot of money. In some interviews I read the person kind of blamed others and condemned them for how he helped them when he had a lot of money and they wouldn’t do the same for him afterwards. As harsh as it sounds, you really have to take responsibility for that I think as it is your choice in say giving away a lot of money to people you don’t know too well. I guess the main thing that I do all the time is to try and find consistency with people before I associate with them to really find out how genuine they are.

Most people that I know who are well off financially too don’t really show it as in they don’t say wear thousands of dollars in jewelry or drive the most expensive cars as a way to expose their wealth. People usually mock more famous people such as Bill Gates for having what looks like such a cheap haircut for a wealthy person, but you’d be surprised on how many people are just like him where they look like a simple person because they don’t want to attract all of the phoney people who are only after your money. I guess this documentary clearly demonstrates that.

This was a very fascinating idea I thought. While I kind of expected it to end the way it did, it’s interesting to actually see it take place and hopefully a lot of people will learn from this. You first really need to be financially educated as when you are given an enormous amount of money without doing so you won’t know what to do with it and can end up hurting yourself even more financially and emotionally.

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