I have been enrolled at the British Columbia Institute of Technology for three months now.

So far, it has been a fun and challenging experience.

But as I have gotten to know some of my classmates, I can see that it is very financially challenging for some of them to be there.

The program that we are taking is a two-year program condensed into one year. This makes our course load staggering. Despite this, some of the students are trying to work as well. Why is this?

A discrimatory loan system
It turns out that not everyone is eligible for a student loan.

Canada still works on the archaic paternal system that presumes that all financially capable parents are willing to put their children through school.

This is not true.

If a parent doesn’t want to finance their child through university or college, they don’t have to. That seems fair enough.

The universal accesibility myth

But what if that child wants to go to school?

Unlike all their other high-school graduating classmates, this child can’t get a government sponsored student loan/grant. They are denied this opportunity because the accessibility is based on means testing the parents’ prior year’s income.

How many left behind?
The government satisfies itself that there is no way that the parents will participate in their child’s educational costs by forcing aspiring student to wait a few years for a qualifying period to expire. Once that period is up then they can access the student loan/grant program.

It’s not just the children of wealthy parents that are caught in the red-tape trap. If you are unfortunate enough to be the child of parents that work in a boom-and-bust industry – you can also be excluded – based on the parents prior years income. It doesn’t matter if a financial disaster has recently befallen them. Their child too, will be excluded from the publicly available pot of money.

An aspiring child who doesn’t want to be left behind his compatriots and wants to get on with his tertiary education – has only two routs. Work and credit cards.

Banks loans are not an option. Young people that have just left home don’t have credit history to get one. And to add insult to injury, because these kids can’t get the subsidized interest-free student loan, they also don’t get the government grant.

Sounds fair to me!

I live in the West End.

Yesterday the monthly Critical Mass bike ride took place.

I watched it for go by for an hour from my 12th story apartment. The Critical Mass bikers completely took over every single lane going both in and out of downtown Vancouver. They went down Georgia Street, and then turned up Denman. I don’t know where they went after that, because I couldn’t see them.

But I could see what havoc they were making.

Barriered in downtown
The city streets were completely gridlocked. Nobody was moving an inch.

The Cambie Street Bridge is virtually unusable because of the Canada Line construction.

The Critical Mass website states that they “are a grass roots movement to take back the public space.”

Their ride statement keeps all the downtown citizens captive while they made their point.

Yesterday, their ride took an hour. They timed it perfectly. It started at 6:00 pm on Friday; just as a huge mass of office workers were trying to get home for the weekend. It took an hour. No one got home in time for dinner that night.

Besides the thousands of people stuck in traffic being forced to waste their time while Critical Mass airs their personal beef, hundreds of thousands of people who live in the West End who can’t get in or out. Everyone who lives or works downtown gets to either plan around Critical Mass or worse, doesn’t know about it and their plans get screwed.

For a whole hour, people can’t get home, can’t get to the airport to catch their plane, can’t do anything. The buses don’t move. Emergency services can’t get through. Critical Mass is making their statement. They think everyone should get out there and ride a bike. Or take the bus.

The cost of time
So why aren’t people using bikes as a main form of transit? Why aren’t more people using the public transit?

Time.

Both those forms of transit place a very low value on peoples’ time.

Businesses calculate the value of time all the time. It is one of the most important value calculations that a business does. For instance everyone is familiar with the concept of having a dollar value placed on employment. Wages for hours worked. Time value costs are calculated for virtually everything we do.

An unvalued commodity
People in general don’t think of time as a commodity, but it is. For instance, if it takes you an hour to get to work, that is two hours of your personal time that you don’t get to use. With only twenty-four hours in the day that means that 8% of your daily allotment is used up just commuting. You never get recompensed for that time.

Two hours covers a lot of stuff. Time with the kids. Shopping for groceries. You can do a weeks worth of laundry in that time.

Time is insidious. Time isn’t officially calculated as “valuable” unless you are physically on the payroll – governments, companies and people like the Critical Ride feel free to waste it.

Why  your time is wasted
There is no compensation to the victims from the agencies that feel free to casually help themselves to your time – because officially there is no value placed on it and there is no way to seek recompense for someone else stealing it.

Notice that ‘they’ are quite particular about looking after their own time. Everyone is quite careful to husband their own time and whenever possible shove the “wasted” moments onto the helpless ‘other’.

Ever gone to the grocery store and had to stand in the line to pay while noticing that there are lots other tills available? There is a reason for this.

The time of the cashier is valuable. She can’t have any “down time” because that costs the store. But as the customer – your time costs nothing to the store. That’s why all the “waiting” time gets shoved onto you.

It’s the same reason why you regularly get to listen to the highly irritating recording on the phone “We are currently experiencing high call volume – your time is valuable to us….please continue to wait”

It doesn’t really matter when you call. You will always continue to wait.

Who is the greatest fritterer of all?
The biggest waster of time is the government. As a monopoly entity, the citizens can’t take their business elsewhere.  There is absolutely no upper limit to how much of the publics time that the government can throw away.

Ever tried to get anything done with the government? Wait times to get anything processed are enormous.

Business permits, unemployment insurance, income tax, access to courts. Anything to do with the government requires that you stand in line or wait on hold. Ever heard of waiting lists?

But in my opinion, one of the biggest mass wasters of time is the public transit system.

I live in the West End and go to school in Burnaby at BCIT. It sounds like a pretty easy and direct commute. But it’s not.

Even with everything on my side – walking distance to the Sky Train, and commuting against rush hour traffic, it would take me twice as long by public transit as by vehicle.

Time wasted. Time I don’t have. Time I don’t choose to spend.

We had our web communications class today.

It turns out that web communications isn’t just writing. It’s also about speaking.

In public.

In front of tons of eyes.

Our designated topic was: The Website.

Duck and Hide
Around the room we went. Each student was required to give a brief two minute description of the website that they were working on.

Two minutes? Two minutes? That’s an eternity! How can I possibly survive that long?

I delayed as long as humanly possible. I employed every trick in the book.

I avoided eye contact. Shrank in my seat.

But inviso-girl was spotted.

Clutching my design papers in my hand I managed to speak a few words. I managed to stammer out a brief 2 second description…..something like “It’s a financial newsletter website that people subscribe to.” Then I leapt eagerly to the impromptu reprieve that I had tacked on to end of my speech.

“Are there any questions?” I asked.

Success!
Then a miracle happened! There were questions!  People were interested.

In fact the teacher had to move us along. I had taken up more than two minutes! And better yet, once people started talking to me the dreaded panic feeling vanished!

The teacher even spoke up and suggested that perhaps instead of creating a fictitious website that I would pull down at the end of the course, I should actually make a real one. She thinks my concept has potential!

Hmmmmmm. I’ll have to think about it.

Move over Suzie Orman!

My girlfriend, Jane, approached me the other day with that question.

I’m known as a bit of a financial nut so people like to ask me to cast an opinion.

In the private sector only about 20% of Canadians have a company pension plan at retirement. Eighty percent of the lucky retirees that think they are pension rich – those that work for the government or in unions and have defined benefit plans, will discover that they won’t be able to access the money they were counting on because their plans are under funded.

Retire at 99?
Jane had been to her financial planner, and the news was not good.

If she worked until she was 99, she would have enough to retire.

Given that dismal outlook, Jane wanted to know if I had any better ideas.

It turns out that Jane had been using the same money manager for years. The little bit of money that she had been squirreling away from her secretarial job hadn’t seemed to have grown much.

On the advice of her financial advisor the money had been put into various mutual funds.

How good was the investment planner’s advice?
What kind of interest/capital gains had these funds been making a year? Jane didn’t know. She had never been told, and had no idea how to figure it out.

Had her money manager ever offered her other types of investment instruments? The answer to that question was yes! More mutual funds!

Mutual funds are an excellent source of income for financial planners. Fees on mutual funds are called MERs. They average about 2.6% in Canada and are the highest in the industrial world. Part of that MER is the trailer fee which goes to the financial planner.

These fees vary between mutual funds.

This led me to wonder – were these mutual funds that the financial planner chose in the best interest of Jane or the planner?

Jane’s situation isn’t unusual.

It seems to me that there are a lot of people out there that don’t know how to figure out how much money they are making (or losing) nor do they know how their planners get paid. (An important question – after all who works for free?)

How much profit is 8%?
After applying my calculator to her statements, the answer appeared to be “not much”. We have been in a boom market in Canada for quite a while. The average rate of return on the TSX has been 11% for the last twenty years.

Jane’s rate of return had been less than 5%.

Jane pretty well could have thrown darts blindfolded at the TSX index and done better than her mutual fund.

A 3% MER expense subtracted from Jane’s conservative 8% mutual fund leaves 5% profit. Another way of looking at that is that the fees ate up 37% of her profit. Every year.

It is important to note that the amount Jane paid to “manage” her fund went up as the overall value of her mutual fund went up because the MER is a percentage.

But to find Jane’s actual profit you have to do some more calculating. You have to subtract the RRSP expense fee of $125 per year. Then you have to minus an average inflation rate of about 2.5% a year – which is the amount of purchasing power that your money loses every year.

It’s a long hard way to make money grow.

So what to do with this crisis?

Asking the Right Questions
It turns out that the financial planner hadn’t calculated all of Jane’s future potential income when they were doing the “financial planning”.

She hadn’t accounted for the fact that Jane had worked all of her life and was entitled to Canadian Pension Plan and the Old Age Security.

Additionally, Jane will likely get an inheritance from her parents who are very elderly.

Things were looking better and better.

Here were my two suggestions:

1. Sell her mutual funds and put the money into Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). ETF’s are a basket of securities which track an underlying index. They are similar to mutual funds in as much as they are diversified, but they don’t have the expensive management fees attached and therefore can earn more money and trade far more easily like stocks.
2. Sign up for co-op housing. It takes a couple of years to get in, but once Jane gets in, the cost of her accommodation will be a percentage of her income. Once Jane retires, this will control a significant expense.

If Jane follows my advice I estimated that she would get about $416 a month from her investments. Plus she would have income from her Canadian pensions of about $1200 a month. Additionally her rent would be held in check at no more than $400 a month.

A very tight budget, but retirement is do-able well before 99.

It pays to have friends with calculators!

I have an 18-year old car.

Not a beater, but the kind that second-hand teen aged car shoppers dream of getting their hands on – a one owner, immaculately maintained, low-mileage car.

Every year, all the car owners that live in the lower mainland region of Vancouver, BC are forced to undergo a government mandated emissions test. The official purpose of the test is to reduce air pollution by refusing to license vehicles that fail the designated emissions benchmarks.

This year my baby failed.

So I took it to a hand-dandy mechanic right next to the AirCare center to get it fixed. It is there that I learned some little known facts about AirCare.

AirCare has been changing the goal posts. At random intervals it raises the passing criteria. In fact, I was told, it has halved the emission requirements not once, but twice. So it is getting harder and harder, if not impossible, for older cars that met the previous government emissions standards to actually pass. Even if they are in perfect running order and meet the previously mandated specs.

Amazing.

I went all over AirCare’s web site. It is definitely silent on this political strategy. What a convenient way for the politicians to avoid alienating the unwitting owners of perfectly healthy older cars and gain kudos for themselves with the popular anti air-pollution cause.

And even better, apparently there are never any warnings on the web site that these new standards are about to be slipped into place. Interesting. Then they get to really rake the older cars off the road and “improve” their pollution stats. I’m all for that!

But does it really have that net effect?

My car is worth far more than the measly $1,000 that I would get from the government’s “Scrap-it” program. So if I can’t drive my car here, what do you think that I am going to do? — Sell it outside of the Lower Mainland. Just move the pollution to someone else’s jurisdiction.

And two seconds later what do you think that I am going to do?

Well, buy a new car.

Hmmm…… let’s see. To make a new car, that means that the ore has to be mined. It has to be shipped to a smelter. Then the ingots are shipped to a manufacturer in Japan or the States or somewhere else. Then it is turned into a low-polluting car and shipped back to Vancouver where I will buy it. All this time, workers are commuting back & forth to the mine & factory to make my new car. Trains, ships and ore trucks are humming along daily to facilitate the creation.

I know that the politicians must be following the advice of scientific studies that indicate that it would create a net benefit to get rid of an old polluting car rather than keep on driving it. So I guess that it’s much cheaper to pollution-wise to get rid of my car early and start fresh with a new one rather than to keep running it for a few more years. I’m glad that I could help our politicians achieve the NYMBY carbon shuffle award.

I just hope their math improves.

Which brings me to platinum. It is an absolute necessity in catalytic converters for pollution control on all new vehicles. As of May 5 it was trading at a spot price $1,329 US @ oz. This represents an increase of 254% on investment in 10 years.

Platinum gained roughly 15% in the last year based on the 25% increase in car sales in China alone.

Platinum is among the world’s rarest metals. Most of it comes from South Africa (approx 76%) and most of the rest of it comes from Russia. For the purposes of investment, these localities are not politically and legally secure for investment purposes. http://www.moneyandmarkets.com/press.asp?rls_id=764&cat_id=6

It’s sister metal palladium can also be used. But there is a catch.

Car manufacturers must retool their production lines – an extremely costly and time consuming undertaking to accommodate the less costly metal so there is extreme resistance to casually switching back and forth between the metals. The other feature is that the cost of the metal is a relatively small part of the total price of the vehicle, so the price of both metals can soar significantly further before demand erosion will start to occur. The other feature is that both metals are nearly equally as scarce so switching from one to the other would simply make cause the price of the less costly metal to rapidly soar in the near future.

Besides being a necessary component of pollution control in all new vehicles, it is soaring in popularity as high-end jewelry and increasing numbers of uses are being found for it in electronics and high-demand drugs like cancer drugs.

Like gold and silver – platinum has all the essential harbingers of money. It is valuable, portable, storable and exchangeable. And as a result, several countries have started minting this metal as a store of value in their country’s coins. Canada and the US being two of them.

How to invest?

Exchange Traded Funds are starting to crop up. Currently there are two available – one in Europe which is restricted to traders in one country and one in London. As of May 4, the London ETF Securities Ltd. announced that it had accumulated over 6,000 ounces of the metal. This is a very significant amount of metal to be taken off the market. Another ETF is likely to become available in the next few weeks on the New York Exchange.

The accumulation of metal in these ETF’s is likely to push the price of platinum even higher. A recent example of this type of price push recently occurred with the appearance of Uranium Participation & Molybdenum Participation by Sprott Asset Management. These funds in and of themselves escalated the demand for their respective metals and have caused the spot price to soar.

I believe that Platinum is a metal to watch in the future.

PS: Watch your car. Catalytic converters are become an appealing target for thieves who know their way around under the hood. www.purchasing.com/article/CA6414322.html?text=palladium

This is my first blog so I may as well introduce myself………… I am a late fourties woman returning to college after about thirty years in the workforce. I am taking a one year web design program at BCIT.

My new life as a student is definitely not going to be easy. All of my my much younger classmates have a huge leg up on me in terms of Mac computer and software experience. My first big challenge will be to just to catch up to the starting knowlege base of the class.

Luckily, I’m sitting right next to a recent high-school grad. She seems pretty nice.

Yesterday, I survived my first trial-by-fire.

I had to take my first little pop-quiz last week. In WORD. Guess who’s never cracked WORD open before? I spent 10 frantic wasted test minutes trying to open an initial blank page (in a usable view-size) in the program while all around me I could hear my fellow students confidently tap, tap tapping their answers.

It’s a good thing that I’ve spent decades as a secretary. Once I got that sucker finally working at least I could type like a race horse.

So why would I decide to go back to school if I had a perfectly good job?

The reality of the world is is that if you don’t have a degree, diploma or a paper SOMETHING, employers basically consider you a “highly replaceable” low-value employee. It doesn’t matter how efficient you are or what great work you can do, if you don’t have the paper qualifications – even if you can perform the work/ produce the product, you won’t get the credit. You won’t get promoted, recognized or compensated.

You don’t get access to employer sponsored education. But the guy with the paper does. He also gets to go to conferences and gets the networking opportunities to develop his own contacts. When it comes to benefits, their teeth are considered more valuable, and their benefit & holiday packages are more generous. On the other end of the spectrum, an employee with a low-market worth is denied all these sorts of opportunities and every year that you miss out on them, you fall further and further behind.

So kids – it doesn’t matter how much you want to get that car/ipod/leave home…… my advice is STAY IN SCHOOL! Beg, borrow, grovel! (I know that last one sucks….:) But do what it takes. But get that piece of paper. Don’t leave home without it.

So as a budding web designer,  my first assignment is to make a BLOG.

I’ve never even seen a BLOG before.

So if it looks a bit weird, you’ll have to forgive me. It’s an assignment for my Web Communications Class.

So I have to pick a topic to blog about.

And my topic (unless I change my mind later – heh, heh we students can do that can’t we?) is going to be finance.

Securities. Commodities. Base & precious metals.

An exploration of do-it-yourself online investing for an imaginary investment newsletter website.