and things went downhill from there

One of the steps I had to take in incorporating myself to be a contractor was to create a corporate bank account. Presumably this means that in order to get paid from this gig, I will either need to put myself on the payroll of the corporation - which gets into the messy realm of payroll taxes - or pay myself dividends from the corporation. Either way, the tax implications are going to be a bit intimidating.

But this is all predicated on me actually getting paid.

The fun thing with this bank account is that because it's a corporate account, the bank naturally needs to take a service fee out of it every month, so each time I checked on the account to see if I'd been paid, I just watched it in the process of going more and more overdrawn. I finally transferred $40 into it from my personal savings account just to stop from being killed by penalties. And I'll probably have to report that as taxable revenue, even though it came from post-tax money that I transferred. Ugh.

Well over a month into my contract, I still haven't been paid, and I began to wonder if I had accidentally signed up to do charity work for my former employer. I mean, I'm enjoying the work, and I get along well with my co-workers, but I've been pouring a lot of brain power and hours into this project, so I was kinda hoping for some kind of compensation.

I started digging around some more - pouring through the terms of the contract, and sifting through other documents on the placement company's website, and the best I could find was that pay day was on the fifteenth of the month. So I waited. The fifteenth came and went with nothing going into my account. They had a lot of "the Monday following" rules, so I figured I would give them the benefit of the doubt and wait until the first Monday after the fifteenth. I checked my account on Tuesday; nothing.

I had been submitting my hours faithfully, and I'd been getting correspondence back from the placement company advising me that my hours had been processed, so I began to wonder if there was an issue with the transit number, or bank account number I'd sent them for my account. I also started sifting back through all of the early correspondence I'd received from my boss at the railway to see if there were any clues or gotchas hidden in there.

I looked through one batch of forms he'd sent me, which was mostly to do with confidentiality agreements and the like, and guidelines that were actually for him. In among them was a PDF that may as well have been entitled "Principles of Quantum Entanglement" for all the bearing it appeared to have on me. Its name made it clear that it was for the employer, and not the contractor, but I decided that I should probably give it a read so that I could say that I had exhausted all of my options before sending an angsty email to the placement company.

It was the pay day schedule. There was no hint at all in the name of it that it had anything to do with remuneration, but there it was. It was like somebody had gone out of their way to purposely obscure the purpose of the file.

And when I read the file, I was no more impressed. Any work done in a given month would be paid at the end of the following month. I started at the beginning of last month, but I won't get paid until the end of this month - nearly sixty days before my first cheque. I'm glad that I wasn't depending on this pay cheque. If my account is still sitting at ~$30 at the end of the month then I'll start raising heck.

We have narrowed our car search down to a field of one for now, and I am going to be calling this morning to set up a test drive. The 2008 reviews are not out yet on this car, but last year's model (which is virtually identical) has garnered nothing but positive reviews. Unless something happens in the test drive that totally puts us off, then I think our main concerns will become those of colour and options; e.g., we really don't need the ski package.

The other, arguably more important question is how we are going to pay for it. Some of our options are:

- Cash. I have been putting money into company shares for the past couple of years. If we cash out about 3/4 of those, cash out atara's savings bonds and pull out about half of our savings, we could buy this car outright.

- ~75% down. Cash out a few less shares, cash out the savings bongs and leave the savings account alone. Put a 3/4 down payment and finance the balance at .9% over 18 months.

- ~40% down. Dip into all three cash reserves and put down about 40% on the car, then finance the rest over 36 months. The payments would be doable, but we would have to start budgeting ourselves when we dine out.

- Lease. We don't see any value in this if we plan to keep the car.

There are various benefits and pitfalls to each of the scenarios. If we pay cash, we have the benefit of clear title from the moment we leave the lot. On the other hand, if we blow our savings on the car then it means we may have to finance the work we are planning for the house (the roof if nothing else). At .9%, financing it would doubtless be much cheaper to borrow for the car.

If we got with 3/4 down, it still leaves us money to spend on the house, and we could have the car paid off before the end of 2009.

If we went with 40% down, we would still be paid off in a comparatively short time, and it would give us much more flexibility to do more on the house (like replace windows perhaps).

I can think of no compelling reason to lease a car, but if you have any persuasive arguments in favour I'd love to hear them.

One of the stronger arguments I have heard for using dealer financing for the majority of the purchase is, "your money will earn way more than .9% if you leave it where it is." While that is true for the money we have stocked away in RRSPs and mutual funds (which we won't be touching), that's not quite true with the company shares. The shares tripled in value over the first bit, but they have been virtually flat for the past 18 months. The dividends that I get on them are negligible, and most of the gain I have been getting on them is the 30% that the company matches for every dollar that I invest.

[Poll #1167168]

Thanks!