Tuesday, March 3, 2009
The Canadian Government is currently conducting a survey about household income and spending. Participation is voluntary, but households were randomly selected. Being a researcher, I feel compelled to participate in surveys, so I agreed. It took about 3 weeks for me to connect with the survey guy, Will, and the survey used an interview format, which meant I couldn't just fill out some papers on my own time. On the whole my thoughts on the exercise were mixed: on one hand, it seemed that much of the information I gave the government was pretty useless in that I had to guess at much of it. I mean, honestly, how much do you think you spent on toilet paper in 2008? I'm not being facetious - that question was in the survey. On the other hand, I did learn that I know much less about the money going in and out of our household than I thought I did.
1 comments:
While I don't know down to the toilet paper detail, in the last few years I became obsessed with where I was spending money and now track it down to categories... I use Quicken and download my bank and credit card statements, and have a spreadsheet on my cell phone for tracking cash purchases. Yeah, I have a slight problem with my obsessive tracking - but to track it down to the item (such as toilet paper) is a little beyond me... though the thought of saying "in this economy, I think we need to cut back on the toilet paper budget" amuses me (though with a long term view, you may want to look into this: http://www.cleanrevolution.com/)
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