Good money habits Archives - Page 3 of 3

September 1, 2020 Good money habits

The best money decisions I’ve made in my life – Part 1

September is here – and that means it’s back to school time. Of course, it’s not business as usual everywhere. Depending on your age and where you live – you may be at home, in the classroom, or a mixture of both! I’m going to do my own “money school” for the next few months (maybe longer) and teach you about some good decisions I’ve made that have helped put me on good financial footing. I’ll also introduce some basic economic concepts everyone should know.

Here are three of the best money decisions I’ve made:

Have a part-time job in high school.
Not blow an inheritance.
Sign up for a co-op program at university.

1. Having a part-time job in high school

I started babysitting fairly young – and then after that worked at Shoppers Drug Mart, in the bakery of a grocery store, and then McDonald’s. I learned two things from these jobs 1) Working in the service industry is hard. Always be nice to anyone working a service job. 2) I did NOT want to waste my money.

I’d come home from McDonald’s tired and smelling of grease – I even burned myself a few times on the job. Working hard for that money made me value it far more than if it had been handed to me. I used that money to help pay for my first year at university. And since it was MY hard-earned money no way was I was going to waste it and flunk out.

2. Not blowing an inheritance

I was lucky enough to inherit some money from my grandmother that I could legally access once I turned 19. I had just started university, so the good news is – I was too busy to think about going out and blowing it. Instead, my Dad got me to sit down with an advisor and I put it in various investments. Later on, when I was ready to buy a car, I had the money to pay for it flat out. I also let the rest of the money sit and grow – and used it as part of my down payment when I was ready to buy a house.

3. Signing up for a co-op program at school

I went to a university that offered a co-op program – one term at school, then one term working. There were definitely some drawbacks – I moved 10 times over the course of five years! But I also got some great experience, learned out to budget my money during school and while working – and I didn’t have to borrow any money to make it through university.

The Takeaway

The earlier in life you can start making good money decisions, the better! You may be at a period in life it’s a little late for part-time jobs and co-op programs, but you can always pass on this advice to anyone you know who is young enough to benefit from it.

What’s the best financial decision you made while you were fairly young that has benefited you?

July 15, 2020 Good money habits

Five Of The Best Money Tips of All Time

Image by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pixabay

Summer is quickly going by – trying to savour every minute of it. So it’s another round-up post – with some of the most enduring money tips out there.

Start saving as soon as you can. The earlier you can put money aside, the better. That gives your money a chance to grow – the miracle of compound interest, which is earning interest on your interest over many years. While retirement can seem years away when you’re 25, your older self will thank you
One of the easiest ways to start saving is to set up automatic savings. This is the easiest and most effective way to save. It helps puts extra cash both out of sight and out of mind.
The more you have for a down payment on a house or even a car, the less it will cost you. It may seem tempting to buy as expensive a house or car you can, but the lower the payments you have, the less you’ll have to pay in interest.
Budget! Keep track of all the spending you do in a month to get an idea of where your money is going. Keeping receipts or putting everything on your credit card (as long as you pay it off!) is a good way to keep track.
Have an emergency fund. You never know when something is going to go wrong. Whether it’s a leaky roof or a car repair, it’s important to be able to cover costs as they come up. It’s a lot cheaper to be able to cover a cost without having to put it off on a credit card and then pay interest in it.

What’s your favourite money tip?

June 15, 2020 Good money habits

How To Get Your Consumer Disclosure for free

There are so many ways you can take keep an eye on your finances and protect yourself from fraud. You often hear that you should get your credit report once a year to make sure everything is fine. The problem is – to access your credit report online you have to pay for it. The good news is – you can get your consume disclosure (which is fairly similar) for free online easily. I’ll talk about:

What a consumer disclosure is.
What a credit report is
How you can get your consumer disclosure for free from Transunion

What is a consumer disclosure?

If you get a copy of your consumer disclosure, it’ll contain all the information on your credit report. This includes important information like:

Your credit card repayment history
Any line of credit you have (or did have, and closed)
Any mortgage you have (or did have, and paid off)
Details about companies (such as credit card companies) that have asked for your credit file information. It also lists non-credit related inquiries (such as a background check).

What is a credit report?

A credit report is considered a “business version” of your consumer disclosure. It contains most of the same information that a consumer disclosure does, but also include your credit score. It does not contain any information about inquiries on your credit information.

How can I get my free consumer disclosure?

TransUnion will let you obtain a copy of your online consumer disclosure as frequently as once a month. To access it, follow these steps:

Get together information such as your SIN number and latest banking and credit card activities.
Go to the TransUnion Consumer Disclosure page, then select the online access option.
Read the information about what your consumer disclosure may contain and how it can help you.
Select to access your consumer disclosure.
Enter the information necessary to access your consumer disclosure.

Once you have a copy, download it and review it. If you see any issues with it, there is an Investigation Request Form at the end of your consumer disclosure you can fill in.

The Takeaway

Getting a copy of your consumer disclosure is free and easy. It’s a great way to get a picture of how you’re doing at a glance. It’s also an incredibly important tool in fighting against fraud – it enables you to see quickly and easily if there’s financial activity going on in your name that you don’t recognize.

Have you ever gotten a consumer disclosure or credit report before and had a nasty surprise?

May 1, 2020 Good money habits

How you can carry over good habits you picked up during the pandemic.

We’ve now been in the pandemic mode for two months. Things are slowly starting to open back up depending on where you are. Regardless of whether you can go back into the office or are still at home, now’s a good time to start thinking about good habits you’ve started during the pandemic – and how you can carry them over in the future. Here are some ideas:

Continue making good use of what you have.
Learn to know the difference between what you need and what you want.
Be flexible in how your approach things.

1. Make good use of what you have

We’ve all been staying home a lot more and only going out for what we need during the last few months. This has drastically cut down on impulse shopping. In an attempt to get in and out of the grocery store as quickly as possible, we’ve all been doing more planning to make sure we don’t forget anything we need.

We’ve also been better about making good use of what we have – whether it’s making meals stretch or getting stuff out of the freezer we’d forgotten about and using it up.

2. Learning how to know the difference between what you need and what you want

Another thing we’ve learned is how to figure out what we NEED vs what we WANT. If you forgot to buy something at the grocery store, you have to think long and hard about whether it’s worth the risk of going back out again to get it. This helps you get into the practice of learning what you really need vs whether it’s only something you want – but you don’t really need it.

3. Be flexible in how you approach things

Some of us are working from home for the first time. We’re also learning how to teach our kids and keep in touch with loved ones via Facetime or video messaging. We’ve had to become flexible in how we approach things and learn to just roll with things. That’s also a lesson you can apply to how you handle money. Sometimes things will go exactly how you planned with money – and sometimes you’ll have to roll with it.

The Takeaway

When the world shuts down overnight, you have to learn how to take things day by day. Now that we’re a few months into the pandemic, we’ve gotten the hang of things. We’re starting to get into routines and learning some new good habits – that we can continue to use in the future.

What’s a good habit – relating to money or something else – that you’ve developed in the past few months?