The Day of the Good Money Luck

The money buddah must have been smiling on us last week, because a few pretty awesome things have happened in the course of 24 hours.

I was joking to J after this all happened that we needed to go buy a lottery ticket, since that day was clearly our lucky money day. I was half serious when I said that, but we actually didn’t end up buying a lottery ticket simply because we forgot.

Most of this extra cash is going into our TFSAs to be invested in ETFs, but with $150 of it, we took a dear friend out for a few drinks and went to a comedy show for her birthday, and we’ll be buying hiking boots for our awesome honeymoon.

Otherwise, we want to make the cash work for us. Adding $4,450 into our TFSAs will be an nice little boost, and with the power of compound interest, will help us reach our goal more quickly.

Cashing Out

We got married last Saturday (July 19) and noticed, when opening our gifts, that the gift tides seem to be turning on wedding gifts. We registered for gifts, because we still think it’s super important to do so to alleviate your guest’s gift stress, but much of what we were opening was cash and gift cards.

We have a really hard time accepting cash from people, gift or otherwise, but after we swallowed our apprehension and got around to counting all that had come our way, we walked away with a cool $1,850 worth of cash.

The day that I went to the bank to deposit all of the cash into our accounts was a very lucky money day, because we also got a few letters in the mail that put a smile on our faces.

The Case of the $2,600 Cheque

J used to be self employed. When I say “used to be”, I mean over two years ago. He paid HST (Harmonized Sales Tax) quarterly so that he didn’t have to pay a lump sum at the end of the year. Having to hand over a big chunk of change to the government is the worst, even if it was always rightfully theirs.

The last year that he was self employed was 2012, but he became employed and gave up his self employed gig in the latter half of the year.

About a month ago, we got a letter from the Canadian Revenue Agency stating that we owed over $240 in HST from the third quarter of 2012.

J got to work adding up the amount that he owed vs. the amount that he paid, and it turned out that the bank didn’t remit the documents that they were supposed to remit when he made his last HST payment. J sent the documents and let the CRA representative know that he had put his business temporarily on hold to take a job opportunity.

We thought that settled the $240 bill, but it did more than that.

I don’t know about you, but when we get mail from the CRA, it makes me nervous. I always assume it’s a bill or a reassessment, at which point we have to do a ton of work to sift through documents to submit.

On Wednesday, we got home and started opening the mail. I cringed when I saw a letter from the CRA addressed to J in the stack. This went the other way, however, because we opened it only to find a $2,600 cheque from the CRA.

Because J only worked for less than half the year as a self employed contractor, he actually didn’t have to pay any HST. As a result, the $2,600 (plus some change) that he had handed over to the government is coming back to us.

The Property Tax Win

The next envelope I picked up in the stack was from our mortgage company. I personally hate getting mail from the mortgage company, just as I usually hate getting mail from the CRA, since it usually means we owe.

It was a pleasant surprise this time, though. We have our mortgage company take money out of our bank account each month to pay the property taxes so we don’t have to think about it when the tax man cometh. In the envelope was a notice that our mortgage would decrease by $40/month because they had overestimated our property taxes.

$40/month isn’t a ton of money, but it will be a nice little amount to put back into the mortgage to accelerate our mortgage payoff.

What would you do with $4,450 and and extra $40/month? Have you ever had a great day financially?