Inside my suitcase upstairs is a huge manilla envelope that has the majority of receipts in it for my trip to South America. Since some of them represent expenses that I can write-off on the business side, it was important to keep them for Revenue Canada in the odd event of an audit down the road. Unfortunately for me though, it meant that I had to collect all my receipts while traveling around the world. It's one thing when you have an apartment in Canada and everything can be sorted into file folders once a week or so, but when you're traveling with a backpack and trying not to accumulate anything ...

I'm sure most of us have some story about a friend of ours who got dinged several hundred dollars or more in roaming charges while out of the country. My friend Chris has a $6,000 bill in Australia, something that unfortunately still happens quite often due to amazingly high roaming rates in some countries. I've been fortunate in that I haven't been exposed to any high fees, and have in fact often spent less in other countries than back in Canada. I spent some time speaking to Gillian Shaw on the phone yesterday regarding some of my experiences with my cell-phone abroad, and the article is now ...