Personal Finance Canada

I have 3 credit cards...

1. Oldest, good for groceries, but that's it. It represents about 45% of my total credit card limit.
2. Crappy card, used to have good rewards but now sucks. This is about 40% of my total credit card limit. A few years old. I use it once every few months to keep it active.
3. My current "best" card that I use for most things. Only had it about a year. Represents around 15% of my total credit limit, but I'd like it to be more as it has the best rewards.

I pay off all my cards twice a month and have a great credit score.

I'm wondering if there's any drawbacks to cancelling my crappy card and either applying for a limit increase on my good one or just applying for a new/better card.

Hi all, I'm new to investing (just turned 18 this year).

I work a full time job and want to start saving and growing my money.

My current portfolio consists of a variety of sources, including GICs, managed ETFs, and cryptocurrency. For ETFs and crypto, I deposit a portion of my paycheque into the respective exchanges as part of a dollar cost averaging strategy. But for GICs, I'm a little confused.

I have one GIC already for a 13 month term, but I'm not sure of the optimal contribution strategy. Should I be buying a new GIC each month with a portion of my paycheque, or maybe accumulate funds annually and then put them into new GICs?

his July, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) expanded its SimpleFile services (phone, digital, and paper) to invite more than 500,000 eligible lower-income individuals to file their return and potentially gain access to important benefit and credit payments.

This automatic tax filing national pilot targets individuals who have never filed a tax return or who have a gap in their filing history, and builds upon the success of small-scale SimpleFile pilots previously undertaken by the CRA.

In early 2024, the CRA invited more than 1.5 million individuals with a lower income or a fixed income and who are in a simple tax situation that remains unchanged from year to year to use SimpleFile by Phone, double the number from the previous year. To date, more than 90% of the invitees have filed their tax return using a variety of filing methods the CRA offers.

SimpleFile is a key Budget 2024 commitment and the CRA is on track to further increase the number of invitations to two million for tax season 2025.

I don't seem to understand something regarding how interest is paid on a mortgage. Say the loan is for $100,000 at a 5% rate for 10 years, paid monthly.

I would think that on the first month, the interest I have to pay $100,000 × (0.05 ÷ 12) = $416.67. However the mortgage calculator says that the first payment is actually $412.39. While it's not a huge difference, it's a difference nonetheless and I can't really figure out where it comes from.

My intuition is that it's somehow related to the fact that interest is compounded daily, but when I take r = 0.05 ÷ 365 and N = 365 × 10 payments (keeping leap years in mind for later), and calculate the first 30 days, I get $409.70, and the first 31 days give $423.32. I guess that the "actual" number is some kind of weighted average since the calculator doesn't ask at which month your loan starts.

So where is this $412.39 coming from? In reality when paying a mortgage, do you see the interest fluctuating as it decreases, depending on the number of days every month?

1% for WS: https://promotions.wealthsimple.com/hc/en-ca/articles/25992559764379-Wealthsimple-1-Match-Offer

1.5+0.5% at TD: https://www.forms.td.com/app/diofitransferoffer/#/diofitransferoffer/diofitransferoffer-form

Lots of reasons to be looking at the framework Canada just published for consumer-driven (open) banking, but I thought this was a gem:

from "2.10 A Single Technical Standard"

...The Framework will significantly decrease the risks of personal data being compromised by bad actors and mitigate security, privacy, and liability risks for consumers and participants. This is achieved through the use of APIs, a type of software that acts as secure data “pipes” to enable different products and services to communicate in a consistent manner.

If an API is a pipe, is the Internet a series of tubes?

I'm planning to open a new chequing account in the near future, and I'm contemplating bailing on RBC. I've been with them for a very long time, and one possible outcome is that I'll just open a new RBC account and be done with it. That'd be... fine.

But for a variety of reasons (including my satisfaction with RBC trending steadily downward), I'm thinking about opening this new account elsewhere. I don't have a ton of hard requirements, and I'm not really sure what to look for in a bank, but the following would be nice:

• Good online banking experience, particularly desktop (RBC is shockingly bad at this)
• Good credit card; easy to make payments from the new account
• Minimal fees
• Easy e-transfers
• Real security (another thing RBC is terrible at)
• Neat rewards would be cool
• Low-fee, low-friction investing would also be cool-- I don't really do much investing, but I'd like to be able to

Any suggestions would be great, including anti-suggestions if you happen to know of a bank that I should avoid.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/17302131

A long-awaited change to Canadian banking is coming

Open banking works by giving consumers the option to share their banking data with other firms. The most common use is granting access to budgeting or money management apps and companies, so that a customer can pool different bank accounts and credit cards into one place.

Ah yes, finally what we've been missing in our financial system! 🤭

Hey all,

I've been lurking this sub for a bit, and came across your flow chart (which is very similar to the American one, minus the HSA for health care).

Aside from some naming differences, the goals are more or less in alignment. Save 15% of pre tax income for retirement, emergency fund, pay off debts, etc.

Having followed this for some time now, and considering moving to Canada in the future, how screwed would I be in terms of the work I've put into my savings for retirement? Most of it is post tax (Roth), so it might not be as bad as I'm imagining.

In that situation I've heard people leave their accounts as is in the states to let them compound, as you cannot contribute to them with money earned outside of the US.

Does anyone have any insights?

Not my content, I'm not affiliated with StatCan

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What does a modest, basic standard of living look like in your community?

Canada adopted the Market Basket Measure (MBM) as its Official Poverty Line in June 2019. The MBM reflects the combined costs of a basket of goods and services a family needs to meet a modest, basic standard of living. Each year, basket costs are adjusted to account for inflation, and every five years, the MBM basket undergoes a complete review and update.

To ensure poverty continues to be accurately measured in your community, you can provide your input on what this “modest, basic standard of living” looks like in your community via our short, anonymous questionnaire. Please participate—your opinion is important to us!

Le Canada a adopté la mesure fondée sur un panier de consommation (MPC) comme seuil officiel de la pauvreté en juin 2019. La MPC tient compte des coûts combinés d’un panier de biens et de services dont une famille a besoin pour atteindre un niveau de vie de base modeste. Chaque année, les coûts du panier sont ajustés pour tenir compte de l’inflation, et tous les cinq ans, le panier de la MPC fait l’objet d’un examen approfondi et d’une mise à jour.

Pour faire en sorte que la pauvreté continue d’être mesurée avec précision dans votre communauté, veuillez nous faire part de vos commentaires sur ce qu’est un « niveau de vie de base modeste » dans votre communauté en répondant à notre court questionnaire anonyme. Merci d’y participer — votre opinion est importante pour nous!

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/canada@lemmy.ca/t/769112

These are Canada's new tax brackets and income tax rates in 2024

Cooler inflation in 2023 is affecting how much Canadians will pay in income tax this year.

As with many Mint users I was looking for a alternative when they announced their shutdown.

TLDR: Cashew is pretty good and free

I tested a few of the auto scraping alternatives (YNAB, Wealthica) but even though they were paid they didn't even have all the financial institutions.

Then I looked into manually entry and the top suggestion of Google Forms which turned out to be a pretty limited hack of a solution.

Finally stumbled on Cashew that had a proper mobile app, desktop web app, widgets, csv export. Perk of it also being free and open source(aka FOSS).

The whole app is actually impressively refined and noticeably better than the Mint Android app ever was.

As someone who had about 10,000 transactions in Mint from 2014 I was pretty hesitant on the switching to manual entry but everything is so streamlined it only takes 20 seconds from picking up my phone to entering a transaction once you have things setup.

1. Touch widget
2. Enter title
3. Choose Category
4. Enter amount

Few cons

• Some syncing issues between the Android and Web App

• General lack of documentation.

• When a Main Category has Sub Category it'll add a extra step for the SubCat every time you enter a transaction. Otherwise entering a transaction is 3 steps from a home screen.

Each week, we invite you to join this open conversation on a wide range of financial topics. Whether you’re interested in real estate, investments, the stock market, salary-related queries, or simply have general questions about managing your finances, this post is for you.

Feel free to participate, regardless of your level of experience or specific interests in finance, and share your questions and experiences!

Welp, Wealthica has just been enshittified. Whereas up until recently you could view all your banks/brokerages/assets with updated values, you now have to have a paid subscription.

Anyone know any alternatives? Or do we go crawling back to manual spreadsheets?

Each week, we invite you to join this open conversation on a wide range of financial topics. Whether you’re interested in real estate, investments, the stock market, salary-related queries, or simply have general questions about managing your finances, this post is for you.

Feel free to participate, regardless of your level of experience or specific interests in finance, and share your questions and experiences!