Canadian Capitalist

Yesterday’s post on Virgin Mobile’s recent service changes elicited a useful tip from Shane and Million Dollar Journey: Check out Speak Out Wireless, which is offered through 7-Eleven convenience stores, along with Petro-Canada Mobility as an alternative to Virgin Mobile. Speak Out is roughly the same as Petro-Canada Mobility — both piggy-back on the Rogers [...]

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As occasional users of cell phones, we subscribe to Virgin Mobile’s pay-as-you-go service. When I signed up initially, a $25 top-up lasted 120 days (i.e. the amount of time you have to top up to prevent your unused credit from expiring) but about two years back, Virgin Mobile reduced the expiry across the board and [...]

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Sometime back, I wrote how the urge to keep up with our friends and neighbours drives our spending habits. In a humorous column in The Financial Post (available here), author Neil Steinberg writes:
Call it envy. Call it competitiveness. Call it a desire to meet community standards. But the need to keep up with the Joneses [...]

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Yesterday’s post elicited a comment from a reader who wondered if it’s worth joining Costco because their prices aren’t always the cheapest and they offer a limited selection of merchandise. We have been Costco members for more than 10 years now and looking into Microsoft Money reports, we have spent more than two-and-a-half times at [...]

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Yesterday’s Globe and Mail carried a column titled “As food costs skyrocket, the restaurant generation pays a hefty tab”, which wonders how we can afford to eat out so much:
We are the restaurant generation. Many of us have raised our kids to think that eating out in restaurants is no big deal, something you do, [...]

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Statistics Canada released the 2006 Survey of Household Spending last week. The survey found that Canadian households spent an average of $67,736, up 1.3% from the previous year’s average spending of $66,860. Household spending slowed down somewhat in 2006 after growing at a brisk pace in past years (4.5% in 2002, 1.8% in 2003, 4.0% [...]

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With only eighteen days left to get all your Christmas shopping done, I figured I’ll do a fun post on some more gift ideas:

GPS Navigators are dropping in price and you can find one with a small 3.5″ screen for under $200 these days. We don’t have one because with young kids, we don’t drive [...]

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Tyler, the blogger behind Award Tour, mentioned in a comment on yesterday’s post that books are about 20% cheaper in the US compared to Canada. To compare book prices, I checked up on the prices of an unscientific sample of best sellers and popular finance books on Amazon’s Canadian and US websites. Here are the [...]

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With the Canadian dollar reaching parity, the lead story in Sunday’s Ottawa Citizen is that many Canadians are crossing the border in search of discounts in clothing, books and electronics. One couple featured in the story mentioned that they spent $120 and estimated that they saved $60 by shopping at Target. It is questionable how [...]

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Kijiji is a free local classified site that you can use to buy or sell almost any used item you can think of. Posting a sell ad is really easy: you select the category to list your item, enter a title, how much you are asking for the item, a short description and your email [...]

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