Canadian Personal Finance Place

About 4 years ago my wife’s bank card was fraudulently duplicated and used (to withdraw a significant amount of money from a non-branded “white” banking machine), and back then I wrote a post humbly apologizing to TD Bank (aptly named: TD Bank I Apologize)  saying, that while I dislike their service fees and many of their investment systems annoy me, I must say that their response to that fraud was very good.

For a while I have been writing about my on going journey for setting up an RDSP for my son, with TD Waterhouse. It has been a long journey, where I have learned a great deal about my ability to deal with complicated government and banking systems (I have more patience than I thought), and I hopefully am helping folks who might be thinking about using this savings vehicle for a disabled loved one (or for themselves).

As my regular readers know, I complain about TD very often, since they are my bank of choice (for now), and I am also a shareholder, and I must again pull out this topic.

Today I received confirmation from TD Waterhouse that my new RRSP account had in fact been created (I actually did this last week in a TD Branch). The documentation included with the confirmation package said, I needed to send in proof of identification, if I hadn’t already  to activate the account (I had to re-read that to figure it out), which annoyed me, but I let that one slide (I had my license copied enough times in the branch). So I am assuming my account has been set up (this might bite me later).

Valentine’s Day week was actually quite interesting for me. I learned a few things, including you should not leave roses out if you have a young kitten around (she destroyed an entire set). I also learned that people really love complaining about the price of bank services, as I learned when I cut loose on TD about their jacking up their fees for Safety Deposit Boxes and seeing the reaction from my readers (wow, didn’t know you folks were that passionate about your financial safe places). Maybe everyone has porno movies or dark secrets hiding in those boxes (as Hollywood seems to imply).

Did I say hike? I meant hold up. Holy cow, I received a letter informing me that the safety deposit box that I was paying $42 a month for (price has been creeping up the past little while), will now jump to $60 a year service charge (a mere 42% service charge jump). Now that is what I call a price jump, I wish I could make my investments jump at that gradual rate.

Another thing I learned when I went in for my yearly RESP Fun and Games was that to get the Canada Learning Bond for my son I had to open yet another RESP account (with TD) and that account had to be a GIC account.

As you have read over the past 2 months I have learned a great deal about the inner workings of TD and TD Mutual Funds and some more about how the RESP program actually works, and from these I have put together aLessons Learned as much for myself as for other folks that may be thinking about RESPs.

For those of you who have not read about my yearly pilgrimage to the Bank to withdraw money from my children’s RESP account, I strongly suggest you check out my list of articles at the end of this post, but yes, I again return to TD Canada Trust to extract money, and again it was an interesting process.

One of my goals is to retire with no debt (not sure whether I can pull it off, but it is a goal), however TD Economics posted a disturbing report on Canada’s Aging Household Debt Burden which suggests my dream may be harder than I think it will be (or maybe I just won’t ever retire, thus making the goal always achievable).

My view is that if you have ideas on Sunday, and you are trying to “relax” that is the reason you are having the idea (i.e. your brain is no longer obsessing about the day to day, and is attempting to think about other things, and thus your sabbath.