Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Canadians spend more on pets than childcare: StatsCan

OTTAWA - Canadian families pay more in personal taxes than they do on either shelter or food, and spend more on their pets than they do on child care, according to Statistics Canada's latest annual report on household expenditures.

Despite the tax-cut boasts of governments, Canadian families paid 6% more on average in personal income taxes last year, which remained the single largest expense for families, even ahead of housing.

In total, households spent an average of $69,950 in 2007, up 3.3% from 2006, Statistics Canada said yesterday in its report on family expenditures, noting that the increase was also more than a full percentage point above the 2.2% increase in the cost of living last year.

Among major expenditures, however, it was personal taxes that posted the steepest increase, rising to an average of $14,450. As a result, taxes ate up 20.6% of the average family budget, up from 20.1% in 2006, and reversing a generally downward trend from a record high of 21.9% in 1996.

There was little change in the share of spending that went on major expenditures other than taxes and to a lesser extent shelter, said Statistics Canada analyst Bradley Snider.

The report, however, showed that pet expenses rose by nearly 10% to an average $432 per household, exceeding the average $330 in child-care expenses per household, which was up by just $1 or 0.3%.

Average pet expenses have exceeded child-care expenses for some time, noted Mr. Snider, explaining that re-flects the fact that a greater proportion of households have pet expenses than have child care expenses, boosting the overall average.

If limited to households with child-care expenses, the average spent is $3,060, while for those with pet expenses the average is just $800.

"But you could say that collectively as a society we do spend more" on pets than on child care, Mr. Snider added.

Households also spent an average of $9,400 on transportation, up just 1.7%, as an increase in spending on gasoline was offset by a decline in spending on auto purchases, it said. In addition, they spent an average of $7,310 on food, up 3.7%, which -- though modest compared to the increases in other major expenditures -- was the steepest rise in food expenditures in half a decade.

Households in Alberta spent the most on average last year, at $85,910, but Statistics Canada noted that was only an 0.8% increase from 2006, the smallest among the provinces, while next door, spending by families in Saskatchewan rose 7.7% to $63,940, the fastest rate of growth.
Households in Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador, on average, spent the least.

But how much a family spends, and on what and what proportion of their budget it eats up varied widely by income.

For example, the one-fifth of households with the lowest income spent an average of $22,340 in 2007 on the basics of food, shelter and clothing, which accounted for 52% of their total spending, while personal taxes, at $577, accounted for a mere 3%.

In contrast, the top fifth of households spent an average of $143,360 on the basics of food, shelter and clothing, which, however, was just 28 of their family budget, while personal taxes, at $41,895, accounted for 29% of their total spending.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Modern Mortgage Banking in 3 Minutes



Check out the new blog at http://housing-analysis.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Financial Planning and Personal Sanity

I appreciate Jordan looking out for me and re-registering the langley-financial-planning.blogspot.com blog so that nobody else swooped in and snagged it.

Part of the process of migrating the blog over to http://housing-analysis.blogspot.com is that I had to drop the http://langley-financial-planning.blogspot.com domain for a brief time.

I am not closing down my blog but I am moving it and changing the focus in light of the pope's departure from the vancouver condo blog. I hope to add a few more regular posters and provide even more in depth analysis focused on the local housing market.

Please join me at Housing Analysis.

Cheers, mohican

WTF Happened?

Is this some kind of joke that the RSS feed for Langley Financial Planner talks about the REBGV taking down the Vancouver Condo Info and the link points to this dead blog?

I'm not squating on this blog, I just wanted to register it to maintain Mohnican's URL, it looks like the blog has been re-established here:

Vancouver Condo Info Shuts Down

This post is the 400th post for this blog and I had hoped that I could post about something good but it appears that just as pope's blog - vancouver condo info - was really starting to hit it's stride, the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver has 'expressed concerns' about some of the content. Consequently the blog has been shut down. I am interested in what concerns the REBGV has precisely and if they try to pull a stunt like that with me, I will make it very hard on them. I will vigourously defend my freedom to speak the truth.

I have my hunches on what the REBGV was concerned about and I would note that the pope's 'wiki' was likely incredibly embarrassing to many people in the real estate community. I'd be happy to repost the historical comments of our local pundits for posterity here since they do not represent libelous comments and they help keep the pundits honest. Pope, if you are out there, please send me an email and I'll post that content here.

As usual this blog will be data based and analysis driven. I take a great amount of pride in the work we do here. Me and my co-bloggers really enjoy doing the analysis.

Pope's wiki is still up:http://vancouvercondo.info/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page