Today is a potpourri of news, economic and otherwise.

On the money side, we know that Canada’s economy – eh, it’s kind of stalled thanks to lax automobile production. Add to that, Alberta’s teachers are facing massive budget cuts and it’s becoming clear this whole recovery thing is a lot tougher than we initially thought.

But Prince William and Kate Middleton have also touched down in Ottawa, so we feel obliged to find a royal hook to all these financial headlines.

(Searching … searching … here we go … ) Wanna know how bad the economy is? Even the Queen is taking a pay cut.

If you run a business or have any serious money to work with, it clearly makes perfect sense to have an accountant, lawyer, and tax pro on your side rather than trying to master complex issues that can really cost you if things go wrong.

But what about all those tasks – cleaning, mowing, shovelling, painting etc. – that, while important, don’t take necessarily take a lot of skill or a decade in university?

At some point you have to recognize that your time is valuable, too, maintains the Frugal Dad.

Would you rather be enjoying more time with your kids, pursuing more entrepreneurial endeavours, or working in the yard in 30-plus heat on a Saturday?

When I was a kid and used to pee in my friend’s pools, er, swim in my friend’s pools, that all stopped one day when I was told what you may have been, too.

“Now don’t pee in the water, guys,” a friend’s mom said. “There’s a dye in the pool that’ll make a big, red ring around you if you do. We’ll know if you’re peeing in there.”

Of course, the urine-detecting dye is a bit of an urban legend, but my, what a deterrent at the time. What’s this have to do with anything? Well, a Florida condo community with a dog poo problem is rolling out their own version of the urine-detecting dye, only it’s real.

Yes, that means a Jupiter, Fla., condo village, if they continue finding dog droppings left on the estate’s grounds, is claiming they’ll institute a DNA testing policy to find the guilty pooch.

As the wave of baby boomers begin to retire, the strains of funding Canada’s health-care system will only grow over the next decade.

Combined with rising costs for most things in general, economists say health care spending, left unchecked, will become unsustainable.

Add to that the prospect of reduced or even total elimination of company health benefits, and aging boomers may be right to be worried.

As it is, doctors are already having a hard time dealing with aging boomers and their increasing caseload of chronic illness, according to a recent survey. 

Almost three quarters of them say their caseloads are taking up more of their time, and they blame chronic conditions, extra paper work, an aging population and increasing patient expectations.

Whenever I owe someone money, I try to use email payment as much as possible.

It costs, yes – my bank, TD Canada Trust, charges $1.50 per email transaction – but it’s clean. No cash. Geography’s not an issue. You don’t need exact change. There are few ways for the average consumer to make more direct financial amends.

Am I a sucker for living by that $1.50 fee? Perhaps, and maybe that’s why I find some people resistant to email payment. But if a new PayPal study tells us anything, it’s that preference for dealing with cash, and for making cash payments, may soon be a thing of the past.

Although it seems that most of the deals on group buying sites are for spa or nail services, they’re no denying their popularity. There are over 100 sites in Canada and over 50 aggregators at last count.

While not everybody signs up, 49 per cent of us have at least visited a daily deal site, according to a recent survey by OneSpout, one of the many services that aggregates deals, filters them and summarises the most likely to appeal to you in a single e-mail.  

Of those who bought, 40 per cent say they like group buying because it allows them to try out a product or service they wouldn’t consider at regular price.

At the same time though, roughly three quarters of us admit to signing up for deals that we weren't really looking for. The top of the list: 2 for 1 restaurant deals, it seems.  

So, are you really saving money when you jump on a Groupon or TeamBuy, or are you simply giving in to impulse shopping that has long plagued Costco shoppers?

Why does Aladdin swipe that loaf of bread? ‘Cause he’s poor, right? No money for food, so he’s gotta steal.

Certainly, save for Ocean’s Eleven-style burglaries, theft has traditionally been an act of desperation.

But in a strange twist, a recent uptick in shoplifting is being chalked up to an economic recovery  and not a further sink into despair.

With the recent postal lockout, the disparity between public and private-sector employees has jumped to the forefront again.

Many Canadians in the private sector, tired of layoffs, wage freezes and rollbacks, as well as the shrinkage in some of their benefits, openly resent their public counterparts’ seemingly cushy working conditions.

Not totally surprising – particularly when you consider public sector wage increases have eclipsed those in the private sector for the past four years.

What’s worse though is that most people (including the majority of MSN readers it seems) really don’t like being held hostage by public sector unions which increase the cost of government almost expotentially.

The solution: Fire the advisors and lawyers who have brought the public to this precipice and aren't ready to play hardball, says labour lawyer Howard Levitt whom, I assume, tends to sit on management's side of these debates.   

If you’ve been confused about headlines detailing the economic recovery, you’re not alone.

That’s because, there’s two stories going on right now. For every group that’s bouncing back, another is slugging behind. Canada’s aerospace industry is doing well, for instance, while our nation’s youths can’t find work anywhere.

The most prevalent recovery discrepancy? That would be between the rich and the poor. Chances are, you hear plenty about how the well-off are back, or close, to pre-recession normal, but new research suggests the same isn’t true for low-income families.

A sample comment from the latest Canada Post story on TheGlobeAndMail.com: “These postal workers are nothing but a bunch of over-paid whiners, with all their fancy perks, days off, etc. Legislate them back to work, pay them a wage that is appropriate to the skill needed to do the job, and what Canada Post can afford. If they don’t like that, privatize Canada Post, fire the whole bunch of them, and start over.”

Needless to say, the Canada Post PR campaign has not won the entire nation.

Yet while “privatize those scumbags!” is a popular sentiment, a good point was raised in the Ottawa Citizen Thursday. If, in a theoretical world, Canada were to privatize its national postal service, what would it mean for rural mail delivery?