Jul 22
(Picture from stock.xchng.)
I’ve been thinking recently, why on earth I live from paycheck to paycheck. Each time, I receive my pay slip, all the money just “disappear”. After paying all the bills, I have nothing left.
When I worked in Germany, I managed to save at least 50% of my net income. Nowadays, it is difficult to save even 10%. Where has all the money gone?
Let’s calculate our monthly living cost (me and my wife):
- Mortgage payment: $1,800
- Food and other groceries: $500
- Property tax, insurance and maintenance: $250
- Utilities (electricity, gas, water, etc.): $150
- TV, phone, Internet: $250
- Car gasoline, insurance and maintenance: $350
- Transportation (bus ticket): $100
- Life insurance and health insurance: $100
If you sum up all the above, you’ll get $3,500. This number still does not include donation (for charity), contribution to pension and entertainment. If you add them, the number could easily top $4,000 every month.
That’s the expense. How about the income? Let’s take an example of a typical software engineer who earns $70K/year (this is not my salary, it’s just an example). After tax, the net income of a typical software engineer is $45.5K/year or about $3,800/month. How can he survive with $4,000 living cost every month?
I’ve been trying many different to reduce my living cost, but apparently it’s not that easy. The easiest thing to do is to reduce our mortgage payment, but it means longer amortization. 
Jul 18
(Picture is from Google Picasa Web Albums.)
I think I am now having information overload. There is too much information on my head and I don’t know how to digest all of them. Just to give you an overview, I read 5,056 RSS items in the last 30 days (according to Google Reader). Besides that, I always watch Business News Network and CNBC for about two hours every night.
According to Wikipedia:
As people are faced with growing levels of information overload, the inability to make clear and accurate decisions can increase their stress levels.
That’s exactly what has been happening to me these days. My stress level is quite high these days. Worse I couldn’t make good decisions.
What should I do now? I think I need a break…. Vacation would be great. Unfortunately, I am still on a probation period, so vacation is not an option. May be, I’ll just stop reading my RSS and stop watching news for a couple of weeks. Hope this will help….
Let’s see.
Jul 15
Today is the second day of power outage in Vancouver. I am not able to work in the last 2 days because my office is closed. There are some offices at the downtown area that are affected. BC Hydro mentioned that around 2,200 customers have no power since yesterday morning.
This morning, I went to my office hoping that my office’s building is back to normal. Unfortunately, it is not open yet. Anyway, since I cannot go inside my building, I just walked around and took some pictures. The first picture below is taken at Pacific Centre, the largest shopping mall in Vancouver downtown area.
The second one was taken at Grand&Toy store, Canada’s largest office supply store. Their employees were not able to enter the building this morning.
