Interview with Tom Drake - CanadianFinanceBlog.com - Part 2
Monty Loree: So with all of that, somehow you got interested into personal finance blogging and you got online and started typing away. What did - you said before you were initially talking about taxes and so on.
Tom Drake: Yes, again it was writing about whatever I was doing at the time and starting in February of last year, it was searching all these different tax tips, how to optimize as best as you can. So it's a lot of, not just tax tips, also looking into mortgages and I've kind of gone more into a lot of how to save money and how to earn extra income, especially again with the wife and taking care of her. It's more important that you can either save a dollar or gain a dollar somewhere, then it's great for us.
Monty Loree: So basically then you're - you said your blog is not your main business, but can you describe what you do for a job?
Tom Drake: I'm the financial analyst for Sobey's West, which is basically all the stores from West of Ontario. So I do all the retail budgets and forecasts and I also do a lot of reporting and everything on how our stores are doing. So it's a great job and I have to do it.
Monty Loree: That sounds like a pretty busy job if you ask me, unless it's automated. I guess when I was a financial analyst 20 years ago, it was not automated and it was pretty busy.
Tom Drake: It probably gets better as new systems come. My extra title is actually Application Development as well. We use a lot of new programs, like SAP, Calix and SAS. They all speed up the job a little. Previously budgets would be done at different divisions throughout Canada and we consolidate them together. Now we just are able to run the whole thing because we've got everyone's data in the data base and it's pretty simple to forecast into the future.
Monty Loree: So with that you must have CMA or CDA training?
Tom Drake: No I don't. I took marketing here in Edmonton. CGA/CMA, it's something you certainly can do. But I've been doing it for so many years and it hasn't been a need.
Monty Loree: Right, exactly. But I guess if you've got a mindset for being a financial analyst, that would translate usually to the blog there and to writing about personal finance. I found when I was a financial analyst in Toronto, I learned an awful lot about personal finance just from what the companies were doing.
Tom Drake: Yes, you're always dealing with numbers. It starts to pick up even well before I had the blog. If you tell somebody you're a financial analyst, they're automatically asking for some kind of depth.
Listen to my podcast with Tom Drake
See Tom's blog at CanadianFinanceBlog.com
Monty Loree: So with all of that, somehow you got interested into personal finance blogging and you got online and started typing away. What did - you said before you were initially talking about taxes and so on.
Tom Drake: Yes, again it was writing about whatever I was doing at the time and starting in February of last year, it was searching all these different tax tips, how to optimize as best as you can. So it's a lot of, not just tax tips, also looking into mortgages and I've kind of gone more into a lot of how to save money and how to earn extra income, especially again with the wife and taking care of her. It's more important that you can either save a dollar or gain a dollar somewhere, then it's great for us.
Monty Loree: So basically then you're - you said your blog is not your main business, but can you describe what you do for a job?
Tom Drake: I'm the financial analyst for Sobey's West, which is basically all the stores from West of Ontario. So I do all the retail budgets and forecasts and I also do a lot of reporting and everything on how our stores are doing. So it's a great job and I have to do it.
Monty Loree: That sounds like a pretty busy job if you ask me, unless it's automated. I guess when I was a financial analyst 20 years ago, it was not automated and it was pretty busy.
Tom Drake: It probably gets better as new systems come. My extra title is actually Application Development as well. We use a lot of new programs, like SAP, Calix and SAS. They all speed up the job a little. Previously budgets would be done at different divisions throughout Canada and we consolidate them together. Now we just are able to run the whole thing because we've got everyone's data in the data base and it's pretty simple to forecast into the future.
Monty Loree: So with that you must have CMA or CDA training?
Tom Drake: No I don't. I took marketing here in Edmonton. CGA/CMA, it's something you certainly can do. But I've been doing it for so many years and it hasn't been a need.
Monty Loree: Right, exactly. But I guess if you've got a mindset for being a financial analyst, that would translate usually to the blog there and to writing about personal finance. I found when I was a financial analyst in Toronto, I learned an awful lot about personal finance just from what the companies were doing.
Tom Drake: Yes, you're always dealing with numbers. It starts to pick up even well before I had the blog. If you tell somebody you're a financial analyst, they're automatically asking for some kind of depth.
Listen to my podcast with Tom Drake
See Tom's blog at CanadianFinanceBlog.com
