Weekend News and Blog Roundup – Fed Taper

Fed Taper

The Federal Reserve announced earlier this week that they will begin to taper their bond/mortgage program from $85 billion a month to just $75 billion starting from January next year. I was a little surprised when the stock markets jumped on this news. I suppose investors believe the economy is doing better. What does this mean for regular folks? Not much. It’s a pretty small taper relatively speaking so I expect stocks to continue going up in early 2014 🙂 There are many online trading brokerages such as Motif that makes it easy for anyone to invest in the markets. I’m planning to do some more investing next week.

CPP Reform Talks

Also this week, the Canadian finance ministers gathered to discuss policies. One hot topic talked about was enhancing the Canada Pension Plan (U.S. Social Security equivalent.) The concern is that some Canadians aren’t saving enough for retirement on their own. So one proposal is to increase the contribution rate, effectively forcing people to save more, which will allow for higher pension benefits at retirement age 🙂 I wouldn’t mind paying more into this public pension fund if it means I can get more out of it when I retire. But what really grinds my gears is that the earliest you can start receiving benefits is at age 60, which makes it difficult for people who want to retire earlier like myself 😕 I currently pay about 5% of my income into the CPP program every year, but if I wanted to retire at 45 I would have to delay the fruits of my contributions by 15 years. There’s no choice to retire early and receive a reduced pension like you can in the private sector (>_<)

Positive News For Consumers

Credit monitoring company TransUnion recently said it expects loan delinquency rates to decline next year, “falling to 1.66% at the end of 2014 compared with 1.76% forecast for the fourth quarter of this year.” Less people defaulting on their loans must mean it is becoming easier for Canadians to handle our consumer debts. Yay! I guess there’s no rush to pay back my $69K of consumer debt between my various lines of credits 😀

I just saw a cool camera pen in London Drug’s flyer. I don’t have a lot of money in my bank account right now. I guess I’ll have to dig deeper into my LOC again lol. I should also probably get a new fridge this holiday. The one I currently have is over 20 years old 🙂 #AddictedToCheapCredit

Video of the Week

This is why we haven’t sent any people to the moon in decades…

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