Can you believe school is back in session? It seems like summer flew by in the blink of an eye!
Back to school isn’t getting any cheaper for parents. In fact, quite the opposite. Here’s a fact that may surprise you: Canadian families spend on average more on back to school than during the holidays. This is backed by a recent survey by online deals website RetailMeNot.ca. Canadians families expect to spend $883 on back to school supplies in 2017, more than $325 more than during the holidays last year.
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As our saying goes, credit cards are a powerful financial tool when used responsibly. It’s when you misuse your credit card that it can cause you financial pain.
In today’s low interest rates environment where money is ultra-cheap (except credit card interest and payday loans), it’s easy to find yourself in what we like to call the “minimum payment trap.” It goes something like this: you rack up a lot of credit card debt for one reason or another and before you know it, you get in the habit of only paying the minimum payment.
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We’ve written many times before about the trend towards a cashless society. With each passing year, more people are using alternatives to cash – debit, credit and mobile payments – to pay for everyday purchases. This isn’t anything new. But what is new is a cash incentive in the U.S. by one of the major credit card players to help phase out cash altogether.
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It’s summer time. Do you have a holiday getaway planned? For some, the perfect vacation is lying on a beach with an umbrella drink, while for others it’s going on a travel adventure in the pyramids. Whatever your idea of fun is, if you have the travel bug, it helps to have a travel rewards credit card to help pay for your summer getaway.
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In the U.S. millennials are avoiding credit cards, but it appears to be a different story in Canada. Many U.S. millennials are shunning credit cards with memories of the global financial crisis still fresh in their mind. Canada wasn’t nearly as affected as the U.S. from the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that millennials here are a lot fonder of credit cards.
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On July 12th, the Bank of Canada did what it hasn’t done for seven years – it raised interest rates. Economists had been speculating for weeks that Canada’s central bank would raise interest rates and that’s indeed what happened. Based on strong employment numbers and GDP growth, Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz decided the time was right and hiked the overnight lending rate. It went from 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent, an increase of 25 basis points.
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