John McCain and I have the same problem

With the Democratic Convention recently wrapped up, and with the pre-convention McCain news that his running mate is going to be a beauty queen contestant I guess its no better time than now to reveal that I have recently had an insight regarding last week's two weeks ago's big U.S. Presidential news story: John McCain hilariously doesn't know how many homes he owns.

Ahh, look at the rich Republican being out of touch with the common man! How can you not know how many homes you own? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Er, wait, those are all his homes, n'est pas?

No, they aren't. They're all his properties, but its not like he has the New York condo to stay at while in Manhatten, and the mansion in Arizona that's his primary, and that beachfront villa near San Diego that he likes to reside in from time to time, and don't forget that little cottage in Vermont with the little orchard behind it and what are we up to did we forget the ranch house near Richmond Virginia? He owns all of them, yes. They are investment properties [and if we need a reason aganst McCain entering the White House, perhaps we should consider the fact that this genius currently has properties in the United States of America, where realtor.com shows $14,000 houses in Ohio, as an investment... -ed]. They are McCain's real estate investments. Now should this change the scandal considerably? Yes, yes it should, because like John McCain I had an embarassing situation last week where I didn't know my own investments.

You see, I stopped in for one of these "annual investment reviews" on Friday, where they ask about your knowledge, term of investment, and risk acceptance. From all this, its determined which underperforming accounts you should be in. 99.5% of all my investments are in RRSPs, which I've been adding to for almost a decade now. So the lovely girl who's been in banking for at least 24 hours is looking over my account. It turns out mutual funds are the way I should be heading.

"Do you currently have any mutual funds with us?" she asks? I shake my head, knowing that I did some mutual fund work about 5 years ago with a non-bank investment house, but really not much else. Just to be safe, she looks up my account anyways. Lo and behold, I do have a mutual fund RRSP in place with them, dated 2006. And suddenly I realized that John McCain's "gaffe" is nothing new.

With all the RRSPs and GICs and such, I don't where my money is, or even who has it. Two weeks after tax time, I couldn't tell you my current RRSP status if you held a gun to my head. I have a pension plan at work, and an RRSP matching plan that a previous job had set up, as well as the RRSPs I did 5 years ago with that non-banking outfit, and I think Wood Gundy took some retirement investments from me when I was 14 years old. I don't have any apartment properties that I've forgotten about, but I'm not in the "buying property for shits and giggles" bracket. I earn 5 figures, and not on the high end of that scale, yet here I am losing $4000 investments into the aether.

John McCain is a rich man. He couldn't remember how many investment properties he had in his portfolio, that being the job of his accountant. There is no scandal here. Time to move along.