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The tools I use for my financial planning (ok the sad excuse for financial planning, if you must know) that I do are Quicken (as I have mentioned before) and Quicktax (because I hate filling in forms by hand). I went to Staples and bought the Quicktax Platinum/Quicken 2007 combination set for $95.00 Canadian which didn't seem bad. Now I don't need all the bells and whistles that Quicktax Platinum has, but given it sells for $55.00 or something like that, I think I got an ok deal with it (none of those bloody mail in rebates either). I would have bought the "bog standard" Quicktax which is $35.00 otherwise, but I think I did ok with that purchase, and now I can play with my taxes.

A friend of mine actually likes filling in his tax forms by hand so he understands it all, and gets to do all the arithmetic work too. Yes, I have odd friends, but it is an interesting point of view on doing your taxes (don't view it as a chore, view it as a learning experience).

What I like about Quicktax is that I usually end up doing scenarios and ideas for this blog with it, and it is great for that. Usually the way things go is:

1. I'll take my last pay cheque and my Quicken data and import it into Quicktax to get my first "ball park" view of what my taxes are. There is a danger here, because I have a couple of "gotchas" on my pay cheque that if I don't remember skews my initial estimates badly (company paid life insurance and a deferred profit sharing plan).
2. I'll usually play with the RRSP tool to see if it's worthwhile adding more money to my RRSPs or not (I usually procrastinate and don't do much about it).
3. Finally when my T-4 arrives, I'll do my final taxes and e-file them (which I think is great as well).

So for the money I spend on Quicktax, I think I get my money's worth from it (this is NOT a paid endorsement for Quicktax by the by). You could use other tools and I'm sure do the same kind of things, but I am used to Quicktax, so for me it is the best choice. Interesting I was reading the Canadian Capitalist and he mentioned that Larry MacDonald had mentioned him in an article, so I went over to check things out and low and behold I was mentioned there as well. Wow! I are famous (said he tongue in cheek). Always good to see other folks are talking about my rantings. Have a look at Larry's site, it is quite good (although his portrayal of me as a money grubbing blogger, while accurate, is not flattering ;-). Here is the RSS feed for Larry's site as well.

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