Day: September 20, 2012

A good friend of ours has left a lucrative job in the Public Service (amongst all these cuts, probably not a bad idea!) and became a financial advisor.

Not knowing what the heck a financial advisor does, we decided to pay him a visit to see what the scoop was.  All in all, we were impressed and I personally had my eyes opened to a few things I hadn’t really thought about.  I do enjoy that this financial advisor in particular isn’t out to make money off of us personally, but wants to help us out in life and if he can sell us a product and get a commission from it, bonus to him.

One thing that I really thought about was the critical illness insurance and I thought I would talk about it here because there are certain unanswered questions on my end.  I have disability benefits at work here, but I don’t have anything that would help me out if I had cancer and needed to take some time off for some treatments.

But I don’t know much about cancer treatments (or any critical illness treatments).  Some questions that come up are:

–         Does the provincial health plan pay for all treatments?  Are some excluded?

–   If everything is covered, do I sometimes fall into a waiting queue for certain tests that some extra cash can alleviate?  Aka can money push me closer to the end of the line?

–          On average with any critical illness, how much time do I have to take off of work?  If I have six months on sick days, am I in the clear?  Would I need the insurance to cover the days I use when I’m out of sick days?

–          Ultimate question: Why do I need the extra money from critical illness insurance if I have a lot of sick days and the Government pays for my health coverage.

So these are some of the things flying through my head right now concerning that topic.  Overall though, a second meeting is warranted and if he tells us we are in fine shape, then great!  If not, we can decide what our life wants.

I’ve tried teaching myself piano a few times in my life but never stuck to it.  I have been thinking about signing up for lessons and I saw a sign outside our post box the other day so I thought I would give it a shot.

I’m in an interesting position…I’ve played guitar for nearly 20 years (self-taught), but I have little to no theory experience.  I’ve picked up pieces of theory from some lessons from Troy but I feel that sometimes I am questioning the simplest concepts because I haven’t been taught from the ground up.  Now that I’m attempting to write songs, I feel that learning to play piano would help this out immensely as a song writing tool.  I explained this all to the woman who would teach me as I didn’t want to enter there and start from the ground up.

After rushing through the rain to my first piano lesson, I arrived a few minutes late at a beautiful home a few kilometers away from my own house and there was a nice large sign saying Piano Lessons outside of the place!  This place is professional!

We chatted for awhile about how to go about it, and decided to just see where the wind takes us.  I already learned a few new tricks up my sleeve and will stick it out for another month at least.  Not sure how much time/money I want to invest but I should start getting used to the idea of taking it for at least six-twelve months to have a solid basis.