My regular columnist, Mom2KG, checks in on the comings and goings of her family’s personal finance and why you should always stay sober at places designed to take your money.

Viva Las Vegas!

Vacations are lovely things. But a girls’ weekend in Vegas – that’s a whole different kinda lovely. I would like to share some lessons I have learned.

• Book early and do your research. Or, book really late. Either way, you’ll get better prices than booking about two weeks out, which is what I did. I got an okay price, but I know there are better prices available if you can wait until the last minute, or if you book the hotel and airfare together. Also, I never knew there were so many airline consolidators out there.
• Budget, and carry cash only to help enforce your pre-set limits.
• Check out everything online beforehand. Pretty much every restaurant, including menu and prices, are available. This helps with the budgeting (and the calorie intake).
• Don’t get too drunk. Drinks are free in the casinos and cheap elsewhere, and you can buy a drink and leave the bar, and even take it in a cab or shuttle! Drinking encourages stupid spending (anyone want to see my henna tattoo?), and can lead to other scary situations like getting kicked out of a bar (yes, even Vegas has its limits).
• Try to walk or take the shuttles. Cabbing is expensive.

Weekly Meetings

In other news, my husband and I have not been doing well with our weekly meetings. For a while it was because we were doing so well – things going according to plan, our to-do list well-executed – there wasn’t much to talk about. But it’s time to sit down again, I think, and re-visit our goals and budget. He recently also bought some more bank stocks. We now have DRIPs in three Canadian banks, and I have one in a major Canadian corporation, so we should talk about other investing options.

Mortgage or Investing?

One issue that came up with some friends lately was whether or not to pay off the mortgage quickly, or pay it off reasonably and invest the extra cash elsewhere. I have learned this is the personal finance version of if-a-tree-falls-and-there’s-no-one-to-hear-it-does-it-make-a-noise, and has passionately divided camps. We’re solidly on the side of paying off the mortgage. Our interest rate is low (and we all keep hearing that the bank rates are going to rise), which seems to me to be a great reason to pay it off – even less interest to pay. Our friends say, well, we’ll never get this much money on a loan at such a low interest rate again, so let’s put the money elsewhere and carry the mortgage a little longer. It’s an interesting question, and largely hypothetical – we won’t know until the end of our lives how we’ve done financially overall, and hindsight can tell us where we should have put our money. In the meantime, as a couple, we have set our strategy and are not going to waffle on it.

Life Insurance, or, Why Moms Rock

I am one step away from obtaining life insurance. If you have not considered this, do it! Stay-at-home parents will be shocked to learn their financial value to the household! Our provider showed us that my ability to be at home part of the time (as well as bringing in a salary) had a huge impact on how much insurance would be needed to “replace” me. I’d always (like every mom who also works outside the home) felt guilty about not “doing” as much with my career, even though I know very well how hard it is to take care of the kids. But now I can see that that choice benefits not just the family as a whole, but also our financial situation! (Now I just have to fill those damn forms out.)