I had gotten so use to our Canadian dollar being slightly higher than the US dollar that I didn’t notice when our dollar took a nose dive. I only noticed it the other day when I transferred my paypal earnings to my bank account and for the first time in a long time the Canadian funds were higher than the US funds from which I was changing over.

I guess in some ways this is good for me since I tend to get paid in US dollars, so that means I actually earn a tiny bit more than my US counterparts. However it’s probably not good news for our economy. Maybe I should start looking into investing my money with a futures broker before things get worse?

Now don’t go thinking that I believe we’re headed for really bad times. I don’t think Canada will do that badly over the next few years even if they do take a down turn. Our economy has been very good for most of the last decade, whereas the US economy took a downturn around 911 and kept on going down.

If you have any money to spare have you thought of investing it or putting it into a higher interest account?

My husband and I have accounts at ING as well as at National banks. We keep money in our regular (national bank accounts) just to pay the bills, but any extra goes into the ING accounts because they offer something like 4% interest on any amount of funds in the account, where as standard bank accounts only give you a small percentage of 1% and usually only when you maintain a balance of $1000 or more.

The other thing I like about our ING accounts is that while we do have some Registered saving accounts we also have regular savings accounts that allow us to access our money any time we want so it’s not like our money is tied up for three, six or 12 months or more just to earn that interest.

Whether the Canadian economy takes a dive or not I’m going to keep trying to save as much money as I can. I know it will help in the future!