How I rank myself...

I don't know whether it's just me, or a natural human-nature thing to do, but I constantly compare myself to those around me. All the time. I don't make fun of people in my head to make myself feel better, or anything like that. However, I like to see how I rank up to those around me.

I look around me and I see myself smack in the middle of a group of people - some who I deem are much more sucessful than myself and others who are less sucessful. Now, sucessful is a relative term. I don't consider being married with children 'sucessful' or 'unsuccessful.' It's a lifestyle choice, and one I'm not ready to make yet. However, things like 'owning a home' or 'owning a buisness' or being able to take vacations or having a huge savings account do factor in.

I try hard not to compare myself to people older than I am. My boss, for instance, owns a home and a sucessful buisness and has a great deal of expendable cash. I consider her sucessful, not only because she has all of that but because she is responsable with it. She works hard for it and I admire that. I know someone my age who just purchased a new home with his fiance. I'm jealous that he owns a home - even though I know they struggle to pay off the mortgage. I feel as though he is more successful than me. One of my closest friends lives in a sister-city to ours (about a half hour commute out of the city) who purchased a home with her hubby a couple years back. They really have a plan, he works/teaches out of their home, making part of their mortgage deductible on their taxes, not to mention a lot of the other stuff that he buys.

I also have a lot of friends who I feel are less sucessful than me. I have friends who have recently graduated and are $15,000 or so in debt with no plan on how to pay it off. The 6 month grace period is comming up fast and I worry about their situation. Most of them seem not to worry though, which makes me worry more! They seem to think it's part of the college process to graduate with debt, but I don't even want to think about how long it's going to take them to pay it all back, especially if they decide to move out right away. Those first jobs out of college don't always pay exceptionally well!

And, for the first time, I'm comparing myself to people I don't even know - YOU! I look around to a lot of the other financial bloggers and it's hard when I see people with net worths into the $400,000 range - I'm nowhere near that. However, I have no idea how old you all are. If you're 22 like me, then I feel like i'm completely slagging behind. At the same time, I see a lot of bloggers who are in mounds of debt. It's great that they are working towards being debt free. I feel as though I am more sucessful than some of them because I have no debt. Of course, I know none of your situations in-depth, so it's hard to compare lifestyles when I know nothing of yours.

I also have a couple of friends who I deem are less sucessful than me even though they have more money than I do. One friend, in particular, comes from a very wealthy family. She went to school in Scotland, and had the money to fly home many weekends (8 hour flight, mind you, but still!) and have her entire tuition and room/board paid for by her parents. She's never worked a job in her ENTIRE life and she's 22 now. So basically, one of two things will happen. Either she'll sail through life with lots of money, doing extravagent things and so forth. OR, she'll end up broke at 35 with no money because she never learned how to balance it all and make it work. Either way, i'm not sure I care. She was the kind of person who tried not to flaunt that she had a lot of money but it still managed to work its way into conversations. She just came off as though she felt as though she was better than you - a little pretentious I think. We're no longer friends, because I don't have the patience for that. I feel as though I am more sucessful than her since I think as though i'm getting more for my money than she is.

My other friend has the opposite problem. Her family was pretty average - didn't always have money but made it through just fine. Once her parents split up her mom (who she lived with) didn't always have money but they had a place to stay. Her mom eventually moved back home, leaving my friend to live with her grandparents while she finished school. She didn't have to pay rent, and the only bill she had (like me) was her $40 or so cell phone bill.

However, she never really decided on what to do in University and jumped around a bit before picking a major. Downside was that she racked up a good amount in credit during that time. Last time I saw she had $13,000 in debt from her line of credit and probably another $800 or so in credit card debt. That's pretty average I think, however, she then decided that working and being at school all at the same time was too much stress and promptly quit her job. She got an extention off of her line of credit and is living off that. Now, bad idea, right? Well, she isn't exactly, what you would call 'fiscally responsable' and still lives beyond her means. She has a lot of extravagent ideas and plans, but no real means to acheive those. She jumps around jobs a lot and never seems to settle. She is currently leasing a car (a debate I will get into later) for about $300 a month (paying with her line of credit) and still spending lots on frivilous things.

However, the thing that bugs me the most is that she's lucky. Things always seem to end up in her favor. She's recently landed a job which, although doesn't pay a whole lot, pays pretty good (Okay, this one's not luck, but the fact that she's sticking to it so far is good) and then yesterday she called me to tell me that her father is giving her $15,000 upon graduation to pay off all of her debts. Now, yes, that is a wonderful thing for her dad to do, however, that isn't really teaching her about the value of money if, everytime she gets into debt, she gets this magic gift of money to get her out of the hole.

She has suggested many times that if I bought a house she'd come live with me, and everytime I politely tell her 'maybe...sometime'. I don't have the heart to tell her no, but chances are she'd have other plans by the time I bought a house anyways.

Everyone seems to have that one friend, hey? I love her to bits, but I wouldn't hire her as my financial counsellor.

Now I know that this post has sounded very judgemental of me, and I'm sorry. I'm sure we all think things like that. I don't judge people for the situation that they are in (well, most people - there's a couple that I do) because it's not always their fault. However, it's how I compare myself to others in this big world!

Hmmm...2 posts today and it's only 10:00 a.m. Slow day at work so far!

And the House Prices today are....

...Here are some stats I pulled off http://www.jimsparrow.com/market-stats.php about the current housing prices in Calgary. I don't know if any of you live in Calgary, but this is pretty darn expensive. I remember (and here is when I start to sound old) when a good starter home was in the $160000 range. Siiigh. Well, here you go:

The average price of a Calgary house is now $473,876, up 13% from the end of January and 19% higher than the average house price the end of December 2006.

The average price of a Calgary condo is now $331,253, up 23% from the same period in 2006.

Uber siiiigh. And it's just Alberta, too! I could move to Saskatchewan and buy a perfectly wonderful home for $90,000. No jokes. Problem is, I don't want to move to Saskatchewan. Too bad their house prices couldn't come here.

I was talking yesterday to my mom about house buying and she called my desire to own a home in the next couple of years "ambitious." I'm not sure if she meant it in a good way or not. I know it's an ambitious goal, but I refuse to pay rent when I could be paying the same amount for a mortgage. I don't think she has faith in my ability to accomplish that. She said the same thing when I told her I wanted to save $20,000 (or 80%) of my income between now and next June. I think deep down she's trying to cushion the blow if I don't accomplish it, however, aiming to save only $10,000 instead of $20,000 isn't making the goal easier, really, it's just changing the outcome.

I'm seriously, SERIOUSLY hoping that the housing prices will start to drop and/or crash so that I could finally afford something other than a bench/shack/extra room in someone's garage...Hmmm.

Ka-bump, ka-bump...

So, i've hit a minor road block in my financial plan. Apparently I owe people money that I had forgotten about. Dammit. I hate that. My bad though, I completely forgot.

I owe my mom $702 for the British Pounds she purchased for me before the trip. She ordered extras and gave them to me. About £300 equals $702 with the horrible-exchange-rate of 2.34. Uuugh. Oh well. So, instead of splitting my last paycheque from Subway, I'll have to deposit that whole thing and then next month i'll have to deposit less into my savings/emergency fund in order to cover that extra cash. Too bad. I was all excited about finally getting this plan underway. Hmmm.

I also owe my sister some money but i'm not sure how much now. It was $400, however, some of the purchases that I made for both of us I took out of that $400. Eurostar tickets, which cost me: $366.54. So $183.27 was her share, brining the $400 down to $216.73. Hmmm. I'm sure that there is more that I took off of there, too, although I'm not sure how much. I'll have to e-mail her and ask (I'm too impatient to wait until tonight when I see her).

Hmmm...my saving plan may have to wait. Boo. Hiss.

Hmmm...I seem to have no control....

Of course, after I made it public to (potentially) the entire globe, I went and did preceisely what I said I wouldn't: Eat out for lunch.

Siiiigh. I even had a lunch! My friend who works a couple buildings over called to see if I wanted to go out. I assumed she meant out to a restaurant for lunch, so I didn't bring my sandwich. However, she meant out like, out to buy a smokie from the hotdog boy a couple streets over for $3. I could've just not eaten and ate when I got back, but then i'd make her feel bad. So I spent $3 on a hotdog and then another $2.85 on chocolate milk and a Kinder Bueno bar. The milk was good and the chocolate bar is sitting in my desk drawer, waiting for me to get the craving.

Yep. So at least now I have a lovely lunch waiting for me tomorrow. Which also means, no last minute morning packing of whatever I can find in the fridge lunch. Mmmm.

I have been thinking oh, the last 15 minutes or so (can you tell it's been a slow day here??) about my budget skills. I like to budget, I like thinking about budgeting and hell, I even enjoy making spreadsheets to organize said budgeting. However, I never get beyond the making stage. I never stick to said budget. Now, I do alright, financially concerned, so I can't complain. However, I am curious as to why I can't seem to stick to a budget.

I think it's because I can't be bothered to keep track of expenses. Which is odd, because you think someone who insits on spending cash for almost every transaction would be more inclined to write down her transactions rather than someone who uses a debit card and therefore has all of the transactions written down for them via the bank. However, I just don't care that much. I do keep a lot of my receipts but I rarely check them unless something goes wrong or needs to be returned.

I think I should look up different types of budgeting since there's got to be more financially inclined people like me, who hate being nitty-picky about details. Hmmm....I think googling is in order. But before that - back to work...for another half an hour before I head home.

The Justice Student, who is also a slacker...

I spend too much money on food...

...and that's sad.

So today, I'm at work, chillin out. I ran out of stuff to do, and remember that I was supposed to get paid this morning (since the job is new i'm not quite clear on the pay-shedule thing, but i've got it all figured out now!) so I trod over and check my TD Chequing Account. Yep, got paid. Woo hoo. A big 'ol $1,003.77 dollars. I feel very relieved since I can finally pay off my VISA balance that's been haunting me from the vacation. I now have a bank account balance that's in the green. Feels good.

I also got to put my original savings plan into action. I couldn't quite remember it, but the plan was, 80% of each paycheque into savings and 10% into emergency fund, with the remaining 10% being towards whatever I desire. Of course this deposit is a little small since, after paying the $454.59 balance on the VISA I only had $570.98 left to shuffle around. But that's better than spending it all and 'starting fresh next month' (a habit which I am horrible for...). So. 80% (around $458) was dropped into my newly-formed second ING Direct Account so lovingly named 'savings' which now holds a grand total of....$458.

The 10% (around $57) was kerpluncked into my existing ING Direct Account that has been renamed 'Emergency Fund' which now holds a total of about $117 dollars. I can't remember what my original goal for the emergency fund was, since all my dork-induced spreadsheets are at home, but I will remember that for tomorrow.

I also have a paycheque from Subway (the last one..sniff..sniff) that I have yet to deposit and will do on my lunchbreak today. However, i'm debating whether or not I should leave this one completely in the chequing account or shuffle it around according to the plan?

If I did shuffle it around, I would only be left with about $100 in my chequing accound to make do with until the 15th of next month. That would usually be just fine except that I have a very close friend's wedding comming up next month, for which I have yet to buy a gift for. Since i've known him for a long time and we used to be very close, I don't want to just buy him some tableclothes and a dishrack from his registry...I would like to buy a 'nice' gift - something in the vicinity of $100-120. So I may split the paycheque from Subway, throwing half into Chequing and the other half split between emergency fund and savings. That way, everyone gets a little bit.

Anyways! Back to the original point of this post (man...do I ever get off topic fast!). So, i'm looking over my online statements for my TD Chequing Account and think to myself 'I'm at work, printing is free, I might as well print them out!' (I hate printing things out at home, even though my printer is good for money, it just seems like such a waste). So I print out my last 6 statements (as much as they had on record) and leaf through them. All of a sudden I realize that there is a lot of debits on my account for food purchases. Fine, I think to myself, I do eat out about twice a week with friends, sure. So then, my super-anal-organizational side comes out and I decided to go through them all and categorize them. So, my friends, here you have it, my spending patterns for the last 6 months:

TD Chequing Account (Not including today's lovely shuffling-around):
Deposited: $10,803
Cash Withdrawls: $731.50
Bought EURO Currency: $2,178.92
Food: $195.25
Bank Fees: $37.62 (This is also larger than normal because of an accidental overdraft incident...stupid fees)
Transfered to ING Account: $100
Paypall (for Ebay Puchases): $685.18 (This is also larger than normal due to a puchase of a Chanel Purse....)
Bought for Self (Books, movies, etc..): $121.04
Cheques to pay off Amex: $480.72
Gifts: $100
VISA Payments: $7,620.41 (Eeek! I'll explain why this is freaking huge now)

Okay, now onto the VISA:
Tuition: $4,221.35 (school is so expensive!)
Flights, Eurostar, bookings, etc: $2,101.34 (This is unusual spending, I don't usually take trips all the time)
Food: $278.32
Clothes: $423.13 (This is also unusual, new job required buisness attire - old job got free uniform)
Makeup: $105.89 (Also uncharacteristic, but can't really blame this one on anything..heh)
General (including stationary, wallet, sunglasses, admission to things, etc): $738
Gifts: $264.50
Books: $17.35
Games (Yay Nintendo DS!): $43.45
Interest paid: $1.98 (not bad but it couldn't been 0 - my stupid mistakes!)

Okay, so, i've defended a lot of my spending. The trip was a once-time thing. I don't plan on taking another large-scale trip for at least a year or so. Until then no more big-trip spending. The clothes were also unusual spending. I rarely buy new clothes. Jeans and t-shirts work out quite well for me. However, new job required buisness-casual clothes, and although I wear jeans, they have to be 'nice' jeans and somehow I didn't think my 'Green Day' t-shirt was going to cut it. So I had to buy some blouses and tank tops and the like. Fortunatly I got a lot of this stuff during a scratch and save event so I did manage to save about 30%, which was nice.

$473.57 is the total amount i've spent on food. So about $80 a month. I think that that's quite large seeing as I don't buy groceries. I'm lucky enough that my parents still buy groceries for the whole household. So that money is spent entirely on fastfood and/or restaurant food. So easily that's 2-$20 eat-in meals and 4-6 $8 fast food meals. I think that's excessive. I started out here (I work downtown, in the abundance-of-fast-cheap-bad-for-you-food center) bringing my lunch a lot, but laziness did eventually kick in and I had to go roaming for food. I'm back to brining my lunch, in order to keep things exciting I'm going to try mixing it up and bringing interessting things for lunch. For now i'm very excited about my salami sandwhich (i'm such a dork - I love pre-packaged meats) and potato salad for lunch. But think about it! That's easily $1,000 a year on food that could have been avoided! Hmm...I wonder what that would be upon retirement if I saved all that money for this year... Hmm.

Now, of course, i'm not going to hermit-myself into my home and never go out, but maybe I'll have to rethink all of my eating out plans. I mean, I can get chicken, burgers, and all sorts of fried-goodness at home, why should I go out? I'll have to remember that.

Well, i'm off to have lunch. And it's sitting here in the fridge!

I'm back from the dead!

Okay, maybe not the dead. But from tiring 7 day a week working and vacations, to name a few. I left on vacation on May 8th, 2007 and just got back on the 24th. I quit my other job before I left and now am only working 5 days a week. I'm glad I left when I did because I couldn't keep up that pace. For those of you who do it, I applaude you, because I sure can't keep it up.

Vacation was fun. For those who didn't know I went on vacation, thanks for the comments (3 Things about Money- Greatly Appreciated!) - it's nice to know someone reads all my ramblings. I went to Paris for the first week with my sister and then spent a week in London with my mom and my grandmother. It was a lot of fun, and I had a blast, despite some minor setbacks. First of all, Air Canada, being the lovely organisation that they are, lost my luggage.

We had a layover in Toronto (Flew Calgary to Toronto, Toronto to London, Eurostar from London to Paris all in 2 days) and apparently Toronto is horrible for getting luggage from point A to point B. Of course, I knew none of this and so had a 1.5 hour layover in Toronto. My sister's luggage arrived just fine from Toronto however, mine was not to be seen. The guy I dealt with was awesome, however. He appologized and was very helpful. He gave me free toiletries (I'm such a nerd for travel-sized toiletries and enjoyed my little bag of freebies) and told me that my luggage would most likely arrive on the next plane from Toronto. It was now about 7:30 in the morning and he said the next plane arrived at around 8:30 and asked if I wanted to stay around and wait. I said sure (hoping that it would arrive) and waited. Problem was, we had Eurostar tickets departing from Waterloo International Station at 10:10 and we were currently at Heathrow. To make a long story short, luggage didn't arrive on the next flight, we had to leave, tube line from Heathrow Airport to Waterloo Station was suffering from "severe delays" and we arrived at the Eurostar terminal 15 minutes before our train was due to depart. We got threw security, booked it to the train, got on and 3 minutes later, train departed. Holy-close-cutting Batman! Needless to say we were a little stressed. Just a little. Yep. Fortunatly they found my luggage and shipped it to my little apartment in Paris. It arrived two days later on the friday. That was really the only major stressful part of the trip.

During my vacation I spent about as much as I had planned to. The plane tickets cost me about $800, the Eurostar tickets about $150. The apartment in Paris cost us each about $228 for the week and my mom paid for the apartment in London (saving us each about $400 for the week). We brought with us about 600 Euros and 350 Pounds for the trip. I brought back 260 Euros having not really bought anything in Paris besides the odd knick-knack. I spent a lot more in London. I bought an umbrella from the original umbrella-maker-people (James Foster & Sons I think it was) which ran me 49.50 pounds (roughly 120 bucks). It's a gorgeous umbrella, i'm actually hoping for the rain now. I'm planning to make it last me the rest of my life, as long as I take good cair of it.

I also bought a Mason Pearson Hairbrush which was also 49.50 pounds. For those of you who have seen The Devil Wears Prada, these hairbrushes are mentionned rather briefly at one point. Man, am I ever so glad that I bought this hairbrush. I have reasonably long hair and it's been lovely. I bought the 'normal' hair one which is made with Boar Bristle and it feels so good on my head. I'm one of those people who usually has to shower everymorning otherwise my hair can get greasy and not look so good and since i've been using this hairbrush, i've only had to wash my hair once every 3 days or so. I don't know how it works, something about exfoliating the scalp and moving oils around or something. But man, it works. I also suffer from dandruff (which was known to get pretty bad if I wore my hair down) and I've notived a significant drop in flakes, too. I'm loving it!

My last, and most luxurious purchase was a pair of Chanel Sunglasses, running me about $400. I got the forms for the VAT refund (if you're ever in London, I would encourage you to do this, since the VAT tax is 17.5% of your purchase and you are entitled to get most (if not all) of it back since you're not a resident of the UK) and have about $50 heading back my way in a coupld of weeks. This was a purchase that I had set the money aside for, and I am very pleased with them. They aren't the huge, bug-eyed ones that seem to be popular right now (I don't enjoy looking like a bug) but more streamlined, less over-the-top ones. THey are green and brown (colors I wear very frequently) and look pretty good, I think. I am enjoying them, although my money-savvy friends are still shocked that I bought them. I am too, a little bit, but i'm also hoping to make these babies last. There ain't no way i'm doing this every year.

Other minor things I bought were scarves at Portobello Road Market (i'm a huge scarf wearer and they are dirt cheap there), pasta at Disneyland (Mickey Mouse Pasta and Disney Princess Pasta - cheapest gifts! 2.90 Euro for the big bags and 1.90 Euro for the small, and everyone loves 'em!), little Eiffel Tower keychains from the Street vendors in Paris, random knick-knacks at the science museum in London (coolest gift shop ever) and a crap-load of chocolate (gonna last me the year and i'm not even kidding!).

All in all I spend about $2500 on this trip, which ain't too bad considering I spent about $5,000 on the last trip. However, I am still sour about the exchange rates in the UK and Europe, so i'm thinking next vacation will have to be somewhere with a favorable exchange rate. I'm thinking Thailand? I've always wanted to go there, but i'm not sure if i'm willing to take the leap out of my creature comforts. I might have to just head to the United States with my saved American Cash - the exchange rate for the States is almost at 1:1 so I can't complain. I remember when the Canadian dollar was at .60 to the American, so we've come a long way.

I'm anxious to get back to work and start earning some money again. I have my last paycheque from Subway in my wallet, waiting to get deposited and the other paycheque from this job should be going through in the next couple of days. I'll feel much better when I have a positive balance again. Right now my credit card has my Chanel Sunglasses and Tower of London admission sitting on it and my chequing account is sitting at $21 dollars. Once I get those two paycheques I can balance everything out and start putting that money away. Gotta get to my $20,000 grand goal for savings.

I have a dilemna, too. You know how I applied for that line of credit to use while I was on vacation? Well, ING Direct called me and needed copies of my last 3 years worth of Tax Return statements. Okay sure, no biggie. But I couldn't find 2004 and forgot to send them in before I left. Now that i'm back, I don't really need the line of credit anymore, and it's not like they have been harassing me to get the forms in. I'm tempted to just not send the stuff in and leave it at that, but I hate leaving stuff like that half-finished. I don't know how much trouble i'd have to go through to call them and tell them that I don't need it anymore. Oh well. I think i'll wait to see if they contact me looking for the forms or not. Either that or i'll just go ahead and get it anyways, you never know, I may need it in the future. Hmmmm.

Anyways, looking forward to catching up on the past month of all your blogs, hope you are all doing well!

The Justice Student