january 2016 BCBusiness 27
pender!
S
Bıg
Hey,
By late 2015, household
debt in B.C. had reached
record levels. While there
are many reasons for this,
an inability to plan for the
future and track small or
irregular purchases is a key
part of the problem. What
the experts say we can—
and must—do about it
Jacqueline Sheppet thinks of herself as reasonably
good with money. She is a high-school math
teacher, after all. She's thrifty—didn't buy her
first car until she was 37, after saving diligently
for it for five years. And she takes the trouble
to look at the automatic expense-tracking tool
her bank provides, Mint, to see where she and
her husband, who runs a software startup, are
spending their money.
So no one was more surprised than Sheppet to
discover that she had done a poor job of figuring
out how much of a hole her new Mini Cooper was
really going to dig in her budget. The routine check-
ups and repairs. The gas. The insurance. The engine
that blew up within weeks of the warranty expiring
and that still cost her $2,500 to repair even after she
negotiated to get the company to pay 75 per cent of
the replacement cost.
"You think that all you have to save for is the
outlay for the car. But you end up paying for the
car twice," says Sheppet, now 43. "I hate those car
expenses. They're always surprising me."
the 2016 the 2016
P E R S O N A L
F I N A N C E
R E P O R T
$
b y F R A N C E S B U L A
p o r t r a i t b y P O O YA N A B E I
