Since there is an election here soon, today was the day that all the main candidates did a live televised debate. For the most part I was expecting a a stereotypical political debate with people avoiding questions and trying to make others look bad. Since the economy and provincial debt was a big issue I was actually interested if people could actually learn any good financial management lessons from the government, so to speak.

If I was to try and relate the situation and answers that I heard compared to an average person’s financial challenges, it almost sounds like a person living in say a million dollar home with a mortgage that is way beyond their means while trying to raise a family. As a result, to me it feels like their solution to pay off that debt is to continually pay for various ways to try and give their kids resources and support that they feel would give them a competitive advantage in life where hopefully one day they will grow up and help them to pay off their debt.

How would you go about paying off that debt assuming the scenario is you cannot say move to a new home? Like in this case I highly doubt people would want to tell their kids for example that they can’t say go to a good school because of financial restraints. So they would instead rather incur the debt. Trying to think of a solution in this case, I think one obvious solution that many would do is make more money. That usually comes in the form of potentially doing side work or starting a part time home based business that requires very little investment if any.

What an interesting thought that was I thought. For example, instead of a government official trying to reduce a debt by being like a venture capitalist when they don’t have the money for it they need to literally find a way themselves to build something from ground up as would a regular person where the cost is more about their own labour and creativity. That is probably not plausible of course due to things like a conflict of interest that would probably arise. But that would be kind of neat I think.

While this is probably boring for many, I think stuff like this is a good way to learn from someone else’s experience even if they didn’t produce the desired result. It’s almost like an entrepreneur reading horror stories so that hopefully they can avoid the same mistakes.

At least today on the way to the studio it was bright and sunny. Since the tax deadline is almost up that means a lot of people are already anticipating on what to spend their tax refund on. Therefore, I talked about what I felt would be the most ideal use of these funds and that if you really insist on spending it that you may as well use the tools available to you to try and get the best deal.

My first point was if you have any kid of debt then it is probably wise to put your funds towards that. In my opinion, it doesn’t make sense for example to keep spending or even saving if you have say a credit card debt that is incurring interest charges. Like with that, it’s better to use your funds to try and wipe out any outstanding debt or liabilities first.

If you do happen to have money leftover, then finding ways to invest that money to make more is probably the most productive use of it. I was even saying, if you want to play it safe then there are always choices such as placing it in high interest savings account. Here in Canada even things like a tax free savings account wouldn’t be too bad of an idea.

For the people that are insisting in buying say a new TV or computer, it was surprising to me that a lot of people don’t use price comparison sites. These will probably make bargain hunting a lot easier as oppose to you having to search every single store manually. The two sites I used as an example was http://www.shoptoit.ca/ and http://www.shopbot.ca/. I personally save a lot of time doing research this way personally.

As well, especially with electronics the other point I made was that you shouldn’t just focus in getting the best value for big ticketed items such as the main TV unit itself. Most of the times when it comes to those little accessories such as the cables to hook up the TV’s they are heavily marked up. For example, you can often find cables that companies buy for $1 only to be resold for like $15. I don’t think anyone wants to overpay that much when you don’t have to. A lot of these price comparison tools can help you see this too.

I then dove a bit into price comparison apps for smartphone users. I know in the US applications such as http://www.redlaser.com are really popular where you can simply take a product off the shelf, take a picture of the barcode and it then tries to scan prices from various sources for you to find the best deals. As well, if you are on the road shopping don’t forget that a lot of retailers nowadays are wiling to match online prices as long as you show them proof of the price from authorized dealers.

The example I used was that there was a DSLR selling at a retail store called Futureshop here for about $450 ass you can see:

Knowing that dedicated online stores like Amazon can often be cheaper I used its price checking app and sure enough the product was cheaper by like $50.

So this is a way too where if you are at a store and want to buy it now as opposed to online, a lot of stores will actually accept that as proof and match the price on the spot. A very simple thing you can do to save money. I know there are probably a ton of other apps and sites people use, but hopefully you do take advantage of at least some of these free tools so that you can save more of your tax refund money.

Who knows, maybe looking at all the different prices may hold you off from doing impulsive purchases and instead hold off until you truly find a killer deal.

I had an interesting situation today where I was actually out with another person in an effort to find a birthday gift for another. However, he had an appoint with his bank as apparently his financial planner wanted to speak with him. So, he decided to bring me along. Even before we arrived I was suggesting that they probably want to convince him to lock in some funds with the bank through investments. While I didn’t say anything in the actual meeting, I was literally there for the entire conversation.

For the most part it seemed pretty straight forward as expected. Since he has tens of thousands of dollars available the financial planner was suggesting that he lock in various funds into investments that would be tied up for like three years. These were safe and guaranteed investments. He didn’t seem too pressured at all and was level headed such as saying he wanted to make sure he always had X amount of funds free and did not want to invest in anything that has a risk of losing money. Eventually, he did agree to invest some funds into three year terms.

He ask me what I thought after and my response was that it seemed alright if you simply always want to play it safe. At the same time the banks really love it from a business point of view since it gives them more funds to say loan to others to then generate even more interest off them. His response was of course as he understands that they must be gaining something to be offering him these services. To him, if they both didn’t gain something then there was no need for the business relationship.

While that may seem like such a small detail, it’s important to think of things like a bank as a business and what they get from you as opposed to thinking they are like an overgrown piggy bank in your room that is simply keeping your money for you. Like in this case it makes you think more where instead of investing into something blindly you should think and research a bit on how much they gain from the transaction too. You never know as similar to a retail store, if there is one item that you know where the product is marked up by like 500% then most likely they are recommending it because they gain more from it as opposes to it being the best option for you.

Today a person asked me to help him setup a wireless Internet connection and for the most part I thought it was pretty straightforward. However, the interesting thing to me was that he wanted me to use his neighbors Internet where he would essentially be getting wireless Internet from them. At first I thought he was just leaching, but when asked if the neighbour knew about it he was saying how they have arranged to share the Internet connection in order to cut costs on the monthly bill.

In this case he normally paid about $40+ a month to get Internet. However, he often found that he doesn’t really need a super fast connection and he normally does very basic stuff such as reading the news. As a result, he made a deal with the neighbor where he would pay about $5 a month to get access to his wireless Internet. That way, he saves a lot of money and the neighbour gets some. If people are wondering how far apart they are, these two happen to be residents in the same condo.

In many ways it can make sense I suppose huh? Of course you have to factor in like here if the person is a bandwidth guzzler then you wouldn’t want to share, but in cases like this it sure can make a lot of financial sense. Are we generally too sensitive about sharing resources like these with neighbors though? I’m just thinking this could even work in ways such as buying food or necessities in bulk and then splitting it to save money.

About a week ago I was talking to a person about money and how just talking about the future can trigger a lot in your mind to the point where you will continually make good financial decisions. The example that was used was let’s pretend you were offered two choices in getting a free gift certificate for a store. You were told that if you take the offer right now you would get $20 and if you wait about two weeks you would get $50. So the question was which one would you take?

To me I obviously said the $50 as it sounded like it made more sense in the long-run. He was then saying of course people like myself would choose that. However, he was expressing how for this test if you actively engage people in conversations about what they plan to do in say the next week or two beforehand they will more than likely choose the $50 based simply on the notion that they are thinking about something in regards to their future. For people who usually don’t surround themselves in conversations such as those apparently they are more likely to simply go for the immediate gratification route.

That’s interesting I thought. If you think about it too this doesn’t mean you have to get people to talk about money or finance specifically. Instead, it could be a simple topic such as what are they planning to do for fun next week or talking about say where they plan to visit for their next vacation. The more I think about it the more this makes sense too I suppose for myself as I am usually always thinking about the future regardless of what topic category it may be.

Not a bad concept to take away I say especially if you are trying to find ways to teach like say a child on how to save money or how sometimes waiting a little can result in getting better rewards in the future.