The pound is still around, as are the pennies. It was the shillings that went. Although, it must be said the pound isn’t worth a pound anymore.

thanks Gail.
i’m loving the show and this blog.

Thank you for a wonderful show – I watch regularly with my daughter and she’s getting wise to all this money stuff as well. She wanted to know tonight if we were going to watch the “stupid people on the money program”. LOL – it’s working and she’s only 9!

I love this Blog entry and must tell you that I’m doing everything humanly possible to pay down our mortgage before it needs to be renewed in 29 months. I have a Variable 5 year Mortgage Rate-Capper with RBC ….. the rate is capped at 5.25% and with the recent drops in interest rates I am currently paying 1.75%. I have additional payments on each and every bi-weekly debit (and have been doing this for the last 5 years) and I’ll have my 20 year mortgage paid off in less than 10 years! The only thing I need to do very soon is see if it is viable to take a lump sum from our savings to get the principal down quicker. I know in the long run it’ll be better and we’ll be saving so much more interest, but I like the “emergency/savings” balance to be healthy ….. thinking carefully about that one.

Thanks for a wonderful program.

I find for us, when we cut stuff out of our budget, it’s because of need. If we could “afford-with ease” the item being cut we wouldn’t cut them out & we’d keep them & enjoy them. We cut when it’s necessary not just ‘cuz we want to move that money to our savings account. ~sigh

We also save $225 per month in our high interest savings account. When the total hits about $1000 I temporarily park the funds against our line of credit (which charges us more interest then we make on the high interest account) saving interest charges.

As an aside, I’ve noticed on the show that you tend to highlight shopping trips. Have you ever run into a couple where the problem hasn’t been shopping but it was because their household bills were out of control (i.e. heat, water, electricity, phone, net, cable, long distance, Cellular)

your other question is larger — do we pay off the mortgage first, invest, do a little of both, build emergency fund… unfortunately there’s no one size fits all question. What you should do is look at your investments and your interest rates and see what makes sense the most to you mathematically and emotionally. For instance if you have a 5% mortgage and pay it down, you are in effect earning 8% return on your money versus keeping it in an RRSP account (due to money that’s paid on mortgage interst is paid with after tax dollars). But if you are confident that your investmetns can return 10% in after tax dollars in the same time frame, it may be better. But a lot of people sleep easier if their house is paid off cause you can’t hide from the rain in a balance sheet. Pros and cons, pros and cons….

Moved our home phone to another provider – check!
Got a home equity line of credit in case we lose our jobs – check (because it’s easier to get credit now when we’re not in trouble)
Reduced number of channels on TV – check!
Picked a cheaper cell phone plan for both of the adults of the house – check!
Cooking every week – check! (and now the food is getting more palatable, woo hoo!!)

People will drive miles to go to a sale where they will save a few bucks on miscellaneous crap, but reviewing an existing expense is just too much effort!

I am presently seeing if dropping our big-bank chequing account will be worth the hassle of moving all the pre-auth stuff (They don’t offer any free accounts, and I think the rate they are charging is kind of ludicrous and their customer service is very impersonal). We also have a credit union account that is really excellent and FREE with a $1000 balance. There are some services that the big bank offers that my CU can’t so it’s not as cut and dried as it would seem. I have really weigh whether I CAN realistically drop the big bank account, but at least my wonderful CU one isn’t adding more expense.

My phone company actually CALLED ME to offer lower rates! They reviewed my usage and said I was paying too much. In 10 minutes my phone bill was cut in HALF (now it is even cheaper than the other guys for the features I actually want and a really cheap long distance rate). I almost fell off my chair at how accomodating they were.

Am I right in assuming all the benefits of working these techniques to save on the mortgage are most effective at the BEGINNING of the mortgage? When we bought ten years ago it was financially a low-income phase of our lives. Now that a decade of payments have gone by, we have put down a couple of lump sums when we could and still have about ten more years to go. The sheet says we are now paying more principle than interest now (FINALLY!)…. so is it better to keep it going as it is and invest in other stuff more heavily like long term savings and emergency funds, or does it still make sense to accelerate our payments this late in the loan?