Benifits of being an Albertan

I must say that for all the grief that some people put upon Alberta, I've been pretty happy within the past couple of weeks.

First off, simply enough, we have no PST. :) That's like an extra 7% per year right there!

Also, Alberta has been making stupid amounts of money in the oil business. By stupid amounts I mean they made 8 Billion freaking dollars last year. They took some of this money and decided to give it back to Albertans. Every person in Alberta, children and infants included, received a prosperity cheque this month for a nice $400 bucks. Not a crazy amount of money, but hey, anything helps! You should see all the incentives in town right now. All the department stores want you to come and spend that money so they're offering deals like "bring in your $400 prosperity cheque and it's worth $440!" and things like that. What am I going to do with my $400? Quite simply I need a new headset for flying and it'll go towards that.

And the other benifit right now is my car insurance. Being a singe male, under 25 with a car like the WRX does not prove to be a great combination for ANY auto insurance plan. Back in BC I was paying around $3,000 per year on auto insurance!!! And here in Alberta it didn't get a whole lot better at $2980, but I did get some extras like a "free accident" and extra free roadside assistance and things like that based on my safe drivers record. That's something that I likely would not have seen for even a couple more years with ICBC.

Now here's the kicker. As soon as you're 25 or older in Alberta the miracle happens. I knew I was entitled to cheaper rates so I called up my insurance company last week to inquire. And yes, for all you bastards out there who forgot my birthday... I'm now 25!!! :)

So I talk to them and explain I want to redo my insurance. Because it was setup in August I would actually have to cancel my current policy and redo a new one. No problem if it's going to save me money, lets get this show on the road. So we do up the new quote. I nearly passed out when I heard the difference in price. Remember my old policy was $2980. My new policy... freaking $1,437! Can you believe that! I simply turn 25 and my insurance rates drop an amazing 51%! So I'm pretty happy about those savings. I wouldn't be seeing rates like that in BC that's for sure. It doesn't help that I'm driving one of the most highly rated (bad thing) vehicles in terms of insurable cars. In the same vicinity that Porsche and other high end sports cars get labelled. Mainly because it's a common car that's been in many accidents, is expensive to repeair and has been a very desirable car to steal as of late. Yay for me.

So getting older pays off once again. Now I just need life to SLOWWWWWWWWWWWW down so I can enjoy my youth. Haha.