Spending Money for Travel

One, two, three…ten thousand, fifteen thousand, sixty thousand.

What am I counting? I’m counting up my airline miles. I was admiring all of my airline miles in a few different affinity accounts while logged in to my Points.com account and discovered something interesting and annoying.

(Points.com, for those of you who don’t know, is a site where you can exchange points in various affinity programs that normally wouldn’t let you exchange points. For example, I can exchange points from a gas station program into an airline’s program and vice versa. Not every program is a member of Points.com, but there’s a pretty good list of ones that are.)

I’ve got over 20,000 points in Delta’s SkyMiles that I earned when it was Northwest Airlines, and living in Canada it would be quite hard for me to use the points as I don’t fly to the States all that often. While SkyMiles is a member of Points.com, annoyingly they don’t allow swaps out of the program, so I can’t actually use the points other than to fly on Delta. *sigh*

BUT, Points.com has a new program where you can trade points rather than swap (trade usually costs money, while swapping doesn’t). This would allow me to swap out my SkyMiles into something that I would use, like Air Canada’s Aeroplan points. My basic question to you is this: do I spend the money to trade out the SkyMiles?

Here’s the more detailed question:

• Trading out 15,000 SkyMiles would net me 5,000 Aeroplan points and cost me US$140.
• Buying 7,000 SkyMiles to top up to 30,000 would cost me about US $200, THEN I could trade 30,000 SkyMiles for 15,000 Aeroplan points for US$220.

Option 1 would cost me US$140, while Option 2 would cost me almost US$500. Considering the Canadian dollar is almost at par right now with the US dollar, it’s not as bad a cost as it would have been last year. But do I do it? I’m quite tempted to do so because I will never use those SkyMiles to fly Delta, but transferring them over to Aeroplan would mean I could use them, either to fly or to exchange into a gift card or something.

What do you think? Should I go for it? If yes, which option should I choose?

Making it All Automatic

One of the things my FA (financial advisor) wants to do for me is to set up my finances so that I’m able to spend whatever money’s left in my chequing account guilt-free. He’s already set up quite a bit for me so far, so that with each paycheque:

• my loan payment is withdrawn automatically
• my savings amount is withdrawn automatically

He would love to set up my rent and other bills to come out automatically, however because it’s not a mortgage but a rent payment, he can’t quite do that. (much to his chagrin–it’s kind of funny to see how frustrated he gets at this.) To assuage this need of his I’m thinking of setting up a separate account for my rent and bills, so that I can shuttle money over to it, and then have the payments come out automatically. That way I can still spend whatever’s left in my chequing account guilt-free.

Slowly but surely my finances are coming together. I know it’s only been 6 weeks since I met with the FA and set all of this up, but it’s quite exciting to see everything come together, you know?

Back from the Olympic Adventure

Hi everyone! I’m back from my wonderful Olympic adventure at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. What a spectacular experience! The city was alive with proud & loud Canadians, who were wooing and cheering their way to all the events. My friends and I had a great time, and I’m proud to say that I didn’t go crazy with my spending. In total I spent approximately $350 on meals, food-related items like snacks & drinks, and $15 on a cowbell and kazoo noisemaker. I had already purchased my Team Canada gear throughout the year when I had the money, so I didn’t end up going crazy with any souvenirs during the games. I did buy a $30 souvenir t-shirt, but that’s about it.

We will find out in April how much we made in total with all of the tickets we sold on the Fan-to-Fan Marketplace of the Vancouver 2010 website (scalping tickets is legal in British Columbia). We did pretty well on those sales, selling most of the tickets for well over face-value (some of them we made twice and three times the money, which is great!)

All in all I’m pleased with both the trip and my fiscal restraint. Woo hoo!

The Numbers Have Been Updated

There you have it folks, over there on the right sidebar you’ll see my new Current Debt ticker. It now shows the one-and-only debt that I currently have, my consolidation loan. Yippee! You might also notice that the number is almost $9,000 more than my previous current debt, and that’s because we paid out my car lease at the same time. In order to get the consolidation loan the bank said I had to get rid of absolutely every credit vehicle I had, which included the car lease, so we paid that off and rolled it into the consolidation loan. Not bad as that essentially reduces the number of bills I pay to one, my combo cable/internet/cell phone. Isn’t that crazy? Oh, and rent too, but that’s not really a bill now, is it?

I am so excited that:

• I am only paying one creditor right now.
• My loan payment is manageable enough that I’ll be able to save for both my retirement and regular savings.
• I’ll be saving for my retirement
• I’ll be saving for both an emergency and to pay off the car when the lease is up next year.

Gotta love it when things come together and life gets a bit easier. Me and my FA are going to meet again in 3 months to see how things are going, and to tweak any of the numbers. If my life isn’t impacted too much by the current RRSP and savings withdrawals, we might increase those to maximize things. By increasing the savings, I’d be able to pay off the car next year in cash. I could actually do that by dumping all of my current extra money into the savings account, but then I wouldn’t have anything left over for RRSP contributions, so by splitting it I’ll have both. And the RRSP contribution also gets me a refund from the government on this year’s income when I file next year, which I could then use for the car as well. It won’t make up the difference by any stretch of the imagination, but it’ll bring me a little closer, that’s for sure.

Success, huzzah!