You, the Consumer

If you run a household you should have a budget.  To prepare a budget you need to know what your expenses are.  Retrieving, estimating and analyzing that information can be a fair bit of work.
Paper billing is going the way of the Dodo bird so get used to the electronic transaction.  There are some pluses.  You don’t need physical cash a cheque or a stamp.  The information is itemized and stored somewhere.  There are some drawbacks.  Most don’t look at them and they are confusing to understand.
Monthly online bills? Fortis seems to get it right.  An online bill that arrives in my mailbox and looks like a complete paper bill.  It’s complicated but they get an A for transparency.  After logging in to my BC Hydro account, choosing home versus office 5 clicks later I generate one for BC Hydro.  Since it looks like the Fortis bill why not just send it to me to begin with?
Telecoms?  Unless you have a contract price they probably send you a withdrawal notice with the latest fee increase buried in the fine print.  I went through one in detail recently and after a couple of hours of eyestrain was finally able to decipher all of the costs, discounts, bundling considerations etc. resulting in some changes.
Still, the very act of making a purchase or estimating a future cost is much more difficult.
Take travel.  If I’m travelling to a resort does the price include resort fees?  How much to check a bag?  Do I have to pay an extra fee to ensure I sit with my wife?   Does the flight include snacks or do I bring a brown bag?
New appliances and devices?   Cheap to buy and designed to be replaced.  Do I need an extended warranty?  What about disposal fees?  Do I buy more ink for my existing printer or just buy a new printer with ink?  This disposable society is crazy!
An automobile?  Buy or lease?  Trade-in or not?  What’s a documentation fee?
Even a trip to the grocery store to buy mix at Christmas adds recycling and environmental fees to a case of coke.
Most frontline people will be pleased to help you achieve efficiencies but please be nice.  They didn’t make the rules and it’s a jungle out there for them too.
The first step in acquiring long-term wealth is not in making more, although that helps, but in spending less on the things we already need.