Today I had to buy some simple stationary products such as paper clips and tab dividers. It was definitely interesting as there is a business that specializes in these types of items called “Grand and Toy” and it happened that I was at a mall called Metrotown which the business had a presence in.

As apparent though, the business was closing its operations in the mall and they had these 50% off signs plastered everywhere as they had to get rid of everything. I figured that was a perfect opportunity to get the supplies that I needed for less. I was looking at some of the prices and even with the 50% off items offer it still seemed rather expensive such as $10 for a basic color coded tab divider.

Since it was the mall, I decided to look around and went into the dollar store to try my luck. The last time I shopped at a dollar store was just for goofy party products. I actually did happen to find what I was looking for and ended up buying my items from there which ended up to be a little over $3.

While these aren’t exactly the type of places I would go to buy things that I would be very picky about quality wise, another good thing to going to stores such as these from time to time is that you can develop a sense of price value for certain products to immediately recognize if something is a good deal or not.

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I was noticing a lot of ads from stores recently that have been promoting Earth Day and offering discounts to people to buy more stuff. While some offers kind of made sense for the theme of the occasion such as if you trade in your old equipment you can get credit towards a new product, other deals are simply coupons to save money from purchasing X amount of dollars. It doesn’t really make sense in that case as you seem to be just adding potentially more clutter.

The one category that I thought was interesting was how electronics recycling seems to be becoming more accessible as a lot more large box stores are implementing a system to exchange your old electronic items for credit. Very similar to recycling say cans at the store for money.

For the most part though, the current ads that I see kind of play with your emotions it seems where since Earth Day is about doing something good/noble ,so to speak, attaching that phrase as a sales gimmick makes you kind of think it is a good thing to do. Should be more about learning to live as a minimalist for the day I’d say which should help you save money and live with less clutter.

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A lady was telling me recently on how she saw some kind of survey on TV where the jobs of stay at home moms were theoretically assessed by various employers. By factoring all the roles such as cleaning, babysitting and cooking it was estimated that you would have to pay a person about $140,000 a year as a result.

Now from my understanding the purpose of the survey was to further value the efforts of people who are stay at home parents from a financial point of view to avoid ridicule when compared to say the other person in the household who is working at a traditional job.

While I personally value people’s efforts in those types of situations regardless of hearing that survey, I personally don’t see how that is an accurate way of breaking something down from a dollar value. Example, it would be like me maybe taking photos for a family album all year long while organizing it digitally and then saying if you were to hire a professional photographer to take the pictures and a computer expert to organize the photos it would be worth six figures. It’s not really the same I’d say.

In general too, I think this is one of those things where you shouldn’t even try to put a dollar value on since on many levels you are doing it for personal reasons.

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I was watching a live court trial today where it seemed like it was suppose to be about a working professional who was collaborating with a company to do some kind of building remodeling work for a client and he felt that the company stiffed him in some way and as a result he launched a lawsuit.

Unfortunately, the actual trial didn’t get to go through as the claimant had someone else show up for him with a doctor’s note stating that he was sick and couldn’t show up. The other side was so frustrated and mentioned how the person has been procrastinating for so long as this was the second time it had happened. On top of that, they have been trying to get this case over with for two years.

The judge had no choice but to postpone the trial and mentioned that next time there can be no excuse as the trial will go on regardless. And I thought those types of coincidental excuses would only work in school to avoid say an exam day.

The person on the defense side was then very upset and mentioned how he ran a 60 million dollar a year business and that every day he takes time off he is losing a substantial amount of money as a result of lost sales and wanted to somehow hold the person accountable for that.

Kind of made me think how sometimes in situations like that people are given a little too much leniency or benefit of the doubt. I guess that is an example on why sometimes people just eat their losses in business instead of dealing with people who seem to have an arsenal of procrastination techniques.

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Similarly for this year, I plan to use a tax software to file my personal income taxes. For the previous years I have normally used Quicktax. This year they seem to have other versions that fall into the $20 line which I suppose is trying to better compete against products such as Ufile.

I am normally tend to stay with one product, but I wasn’t too happy about the drastic price increase in the T2 version of the Quicktax software and so that made me consider trying something new for my personal returns. I think at this point unless I find a coupon or something to make the purchase worthwhile I’ll probably use something like Ufile instead this year.

A lot better than filing paper returns though I must say.

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