Capital Wealth Management
92 Church Street L2R 3C8 Saint Catharines, ON, Canada

Everybody knows that they should ideally be saving money, but not everyone knows how much they need.

The Need for Canadians to Control their spending Every January the thought of most Canadians is where can we book that last minute vacation or I wish I bought a snow blower to deal with the winter weather. The next big moment that comes towards the end of January is when we go to our mail box and that dreaded credit card bill is in our box. December is a great month of celebrations and family getting together, but all of that commercialism comes with a price tag and the ...lavish spending rears its ugly face in January. Canadians today are tacking on more debt than ever before. A CBC news report states that the average Canadian now owes $22,081 of consumer debt and that figure doesn’t include mortgage debt. All told, consumer debt among Canadians has now totaled a whopping $1.7 trillion. Credit cards balances as of the end of June were $2,280 and other debts excluding mortgages totaled just shy of $20,000. It’s a challenging time for most Canadians! Prices of goods have been rising faster than wages, mortgage rates on renewal are higher now than they were 5 years ago and most Canadians are finding that there is less money left over after expenses each week. The challenging news is that prices aren’t going down; mortgage rates may be on the rise, so we have to start being disciplined so as to lessen additional debt. So what do we do? Well here are a few thoughts that can hopefully ease your sleepless nights when it comes to the debt most of you are creating: 1. Design and live within your budget. I know this seems hard and it’s not going to be fun, but it’s the only way to fix the source of the illness, your over spending. 2. Think twice before you trade in your car for a newer fancier model and then roll your monthly payments in to a longer term. Car companies are classic for this. Cars are the worst investment, period. 3. Skip using credit cards at Christmas and try to pay in cash. 4. Avoid keeping up with the Jones’, no one really cares about what you have and in the end, it’s you who is stuck with the debt for playing a big shot. 5. Always pay off your monthly credit card balance. Banks get rich on selling debt, not savings. 6. Stop allowing the banks to get you to take on more debt via a new credit limit increase. When these options come in the mail, shred them as fast as you can. In the end as humans, we tend to gravitate to what’s fun and easy. Short term gain gives over to long term pain, however I do know that our wealthiest clients don’t engage in high amounts of consumer debt. The greatest way to create wealth at any income is to get out of debt as fast as possible and maintain discipline on personal credit.

A Blended Family Requires a Financial Game Plan Over the past few years the one are of financial planning that I feel is being completely overlooked by most is the planning around a second marriage and/or the blended family. In Canada today census reports tell us that 1 in 8 families with children are those of the blended mix, this requires a game plan more than ever. This new cohort is a completely special planning segment of its own. Blending a family is a challenging and o...Continue reading