Written back in 2007. So the cogitations and expletives that have been expounded by me in the past few days have been due to my computer being sick. The hard drive crashed yesterday, but luckily not too badly. I will now spend a day or two cleaning up my system, due to my pack rat software installations.
What does this have to do with Financial Planning? I run Quicken on this machine and I have most of my excel workbooks for finance here as well. If this computer had died with no backup, I would have been SUNK. When was the last time you backed up your computer(s)? If you are doing anything online for your financial well-being, you might want to consider that.
Long-Term Mortgage Rates Going Up
If you haven’t locked in long-term, it will cost you more today to get a long-term Mortgage. Most of the major banks are guessing that interest rates will go up in the long term, so they are raising their long-term rates to hedge against this. Long-term bond yields have been up, and inflation is still above what the Bank of Canada wants so that they may be right.
How much for a new house in 2007?
Well if you don’t live on the Prairies, your new house price is slowing a great deal, however, if you do live on the prairies, that is another story. Where I live, the increase is less than inflation, so that is cool, but in Saskatoon, is it over 50%?!? Holy crap!
| New Housing Price Indexes | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2007 | August 2006 to August 2007 | July to August 2007 | |||||
| (1997=100) | % change | ||||||
| Canada total | 155.1 | 6.5 | 0.4 | ||||
| House only | 165.1 | 6.0 | 0.6 | ||||
| Land only | 135.6 | 7.8 | 0.1 | ||||
| St. John’s | 137.8 | 4.5 | 1.2 | ||||
| Halifax | 139.8 | 7.0 | 0.1 | ||||
| Charlottetown | 117.8 | 0.2 | 0.0 | ||||
| Saint John, Fredericton and Moncton | 114.4 | 0.8 | 0.6 | ||||
| Quebec | 148.0 | 3.9 | 0.7 | ||||
| Montreal | 155.3 | 4.5 | 1.1 | ||||
| Ottawa & Gatineau | 162.0 | 1.1 | 0.2 | ||||
| Toronto and Oshawa | 141.7 | 2.4 | 0.4 | ||||
| Hamilton | 148.5 | 3.1 | -0.7 | ||||
| St. Catharines & Niagara | 151.7 | 4.3 | 1.1 | ||||
| Kitchener | 139.7 | 1.9 | 0.3 | ||||
| London | 138.4 | 3.2 | -0.1 | ||||
| Windsor | 103.0 | -2.8 | 0.7 | ||||
| Greater Sudbury and Thunder Bay | 106.3 | 4.1 | 0.4 | ||||
| Winnipeg | 168.9 | 16.0 | 0.5 | ||||
| Regina | 201.8 | 29.2 | 5.3 | ||||
| Saskatoon | 212.1 | 53.6 | 1.4 | ||||
| Calgary | 248.9 | 6.1 | 0.0 | ||||
| Edmonton | 248.4 | 30.2 | 0.4 | ||||
| Vancouver | 122.4 | 6.6 | 0.1 | ||||
| Victoria | 118.7 | 0.4 | 0.0 | ||||
| Note: | View the census subdivisions that comprise the metropolitan areas online. | |||||
| Note: | View the census subdivisions that comprise the metropolitan areas online. | ||||||
In the days of cheap hard drives, CD’s, DVD’s, Tapes, USB Keys, Flash Memory, Diskettes (I know, antiquated), Online Storage, NAS Drives . . . if you don’t have backups of important data, you don’t deserve to have your important data on the computer.
Also, you should look in to having a dual hard drive system. Even if you don’t RAID them, set up a scheduled task that copies your data from one drive to the other every night.
Heck, even if you have two computers and a router/switch/hub you can set each one to back up their data to the other one very easily.