Weekend Business and Blog Roundup – April 21

Hope everyone is having a great weekend. Let’s look at some business and economic news we should care about.

Snail Mail Slowing Down – Canada Post made $127M in profit last year but the amount of shipments have been declining. I hope they can find new ways to make money. This company employs about 71,000 workers in Canada and is a big driver in our economy.

Low Growth – The IMF (International Monetary Fund) has downgraded Canada’s growth prospects to just 1.5% for 2013. This is great news for Canadians with debt because it probably means our interest rates will stay low for the time being. How can we take advantage of this? Well personally I plan to borrow more money to invest in assets that will directly benefit from faster growing developing countries. The IMF says that global growth on average is expected to be 3.3% this year 😀 So if we’re doing worse than the average, then there must be other countries that are doing better 🙂 My strategy is to leverage borrowed money from a place of low growth to invest in high growth environments 😉 

Losing its Glitter – Gold fell in price dramatically lately. I’m not too worried even though I’m invested in gold. China and India are huge customers of gold. China’s economy is still growing north of 5% a year so eventually precious metals should recover which means now might be a good time to start buying some gold if one doesn’t yet have any.

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Blog roundup – Personal finance and other interesting articles from around the web
Being frugal has an article on suggestions for lending money people close to you
Add Vodka warns that over deprivation can actually backfire
Agent Fang shares a frugal way to prepare some delicious home made chicken karaage
Dividend Ninja takes us through a couple of resource stocks he just bought.
Girl meets Debt discusses what she likes and dislikes about blogging as a PF blogger
Modest Money has a post on what you should if you’re traveling and run into problems with a rental car

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Liquid Updates – What’s new with me

Bought some cool entertainment recently. Thought I’d share in case anyone was curious to know what I do in my spare time.

I also recently made a major purchase. It costed me over $2,000. Since I didn’t have any savings or an emergency fund I used my line of credit to pay for it haha. I’ll blog about my new awesome purchase this upcoming week, but here’s a hint; vampires are allergic to it 🙂

I think I may have a spending problem. I keep buying stuff I don’t even need. As if going into $2,000 of debt wasn’t bad enough I also found myself purchasing something else last week. Except this one costs WAY MORE. It’s so expensive it makes $2,000 look like a rounding error. If you follow me on the twitter, you may have seen this. 

More details to come later. It will probably mean going into more debt for me to finance the purchase. But I’m okay with that since using other people’s money was how I made 12.5% on my farmland investment last year. Some might say going into debt can restrict your freedom. But I think it can also create the foundation for wealth and financial freedom. Debt is a tool. It just depends on what we use it for 🙂