Happy new years everyone. It seems like here there is a lot of fees are going up when it comes to provincial stuff such as income taxes and even various things like pubic transportation getting more expensive. Of course this has a lot of people saying how that isn’t good for the economy and such. One thing that this made me think of is the public transportation price and how I remember a quote before of someone saying compared to a car you are getting a bargain for what you pay. Therefore the small increase shouldn’t matter much.

It made me think because if you are trying to lure people into using it more from a financial point of view isn’t it better to make it a lot cheaper as opposed to just a little? I know the argument is usually that people are willing to pay so many dollars for another thing anyways so you would think they shouldn’t be apprehensive if you price it similar except a bit cheaper. I personally think that only really works if what you offer is in a sense exactly the same thing. Example, people that run a barber shop where if everyone else is charging $10 per cut then realistically you can say you can undercut it by just a little. However, saying like because people are willing to pay $12 to watch one movie in the theatres means that people should be contempt to pay $10 to order one movie on their TV as it is a bargain in comparison doesn’t work the same I think.

I would be inclined to say there you would need to make it a lot cheaper as it is not the same. Either way guess people will have to adapt to the increases since these are more of an essential service of sort as opposed a non essential.

It’s that time again where everyone starts to make new years resolutions. Of course in most cases people don’t actually follow through with them and one thing I noticed more this year is actual products and services that are designed to help people follow through with their resolution. Example, if you are someone buying a gym membership then you will be paying for someone to make sure that you will actually go to the gym.

Guess with that in mind the no brainer way to save money in the new years is to make a goal/resolution that you will actually be self motivated and passionate about in following through with. I usually use the new years to think of things where I can build something from nothing so to speak. That way it’s more of an exercise of time and creativity as opposed to trying to go against something as if it is a chore. Whatever it is you choose you should have fun with it too I say.

Okay, it’s not 2013 yet. But in a few days Chinese New Years is happening which means a similar amount of spending money and activities. This is one of those thirty day periods too where it feels like every week or so there is some kind of holiday or special event taking place. It’s so easy to drain yourself financially if you don’t semi pre-budget yourself ahead of time.

Although in Chinese New years usually end up getting money as it is a tradition for married people to give money for good luck. The funny thing I always thought in getting this money is that it is kind of like a loan I thought where when I become the married guy then it’s my turn to give the money back to others to continue a cycle. This was actually one way I learned to save money a lot as I treated all this extra money that people gave me as simply an investment where I collected interest from it in the bank.

I guess the thing was I didn’t really see it as “my money” so to speak as opposed to people giving it to me because they want me to use it to become fortunate so that I can then be the one giving when the time comes. I even remember my older brother trying to scare me to spend it all at Mcdonalds because he claimed to me if I didn’t spend it my parents would take it away after. Glad I didn’t take that advice.

Happy 2012 everyone. Hope everyone is having a great new years celebration. From my end there seems to be a lot of feasting this year. Something different I guess as everyone is trying to be like a chef for some reason it seems. Lots of new stuff for me to learn and do this year especially in the area of getting used to being bit more mobile with my work.

I was seriously debating about restructuring some stuff too as a result. We’ll have to see how everything goes as most businesses too are still closed for the week. Happy new years.

I guess I should be just focusing in relaxing for the new years, but getting this new phone made me want to research all the options available on how I can better streamline some of my work on the road. As well, some of the devices that I don’t really need to carry anymore as a result of the features available in this.

I think the biggest thing is exploring all these apps that you can download. While many of them are free, a lot of them cost money. Of course as usual I opted to look at all the free options first and thus far I don’t see anything that I would need to pay money for. Maybe it is a little too early, but another thought that was immediately circling my mind is finding a way to do something in that app market such as creating a project and seeing how well it would do.

Another thing that was crossing my mind is although my new phone plan has unlimited calling to anywhere in Canada and the US I never really had any immediate plans to use those features as it was just included. This makes me wonder if I should find something in order to utilize this free feature. Would be kind of funny if I told people that they could use my phone and call to a long distance area for one cent a minute or something along those lines.

One thing that I couldn’t really find at the moment was a good voice to text software as I can imagine that would help immensely as oppose to trying to type out long paragraphs with the on screen keyboard. All in all, it feels like I made the switch at the right time. Only a few hours away to the new years.