Conquering your debt in 2017 starts with a written financial plan + MORE Jan 5th

The “Big Five” Canadian banks offer investment funds and include Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto Dominion Bank (TD Canada Trust), Bank of Nova Scotia, Bank of Montreal and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). Let’s explore the best place for you to invest.
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TORONTO — Financial planner Annie Kvick has one simple piece of advice for anyone struggling with money worries and debt stress in the new year: Get out of your head and start creating a financial plan.
“Most people actually have a pretty good understanding of their fixed costs. But they might not have written them down,” says Kvick, a certified money coach in North Vancouver, B.C.
“It’s easy to say, ‘Oh I think my cable bill is $145 a month,’ when it’s actually $175. All of these small things add up in the big run.”
Jamie Golombek, managing director of tax and estate planning for CIBC Wealth Advisory Services, concurs.
He points to a recent online survey conducted for the bank showing that while Canadians’ No. 1 goal for 2017 is to reduce debt, only a quarter also said they plan to create a household budget to do this.
Here are some tips for slaying the spending dragon and conquering debt.
Evaluate non-essential spending
When it comes to avoiding debt, one of the biggest obstacles Golombek has observed across all income levels is prioritizing discretionary over non-discretionary spending— or put another way, failing to distinguish between needs and wants…

Continue Reading On moneysense.ca »

OTTAWA _ Federal numbers released quietly by the government late last month are painting a bleak picture of Canada’s financial future _ one filled with decades of deficits.
The report, published on the Finance Department website two days before Christmas, predicts that barring any policy changes the federal government could be on track to run annual shortfalls until at least 2050-51.
The document says that if such a scenario plays out, the federal debt could climb past $1.5 trillion by that same year _ more than double its current level.
To help explain the prediction, the report points to the major economic challenge caused by the gradual retirement of baby boomers. The demographic shift is expected to shrink work-force participation, erode labour productivity and drive up expenditures for things like elderly benefits.
However, the report cautions that its projections are intended to represent a plausible baseline and insists they are not forecasts because long-term estimates are inherently uncertain…

Continue Reading On canadianbusiness.com »

We started 2016 with a friendly stock picking contest, which means that it’s high time to look at the results – and to issue a new challenge for 2017.
Last year’s challenge was to build a fantasy portfolio using the 10 Canadian dividend paying stocks in the Safer Canadian Dogs list. Each fantasy portfolio started out with an equal amount of money in each stock and each contestant had to pick one stock to sell and one stock to buy. After making that fateful choice, each fantasy portfolio was fixed for the year with $20,000 in the favourite stock, nothing in the one that was sold, and $10,000 in each of the remaining eight. The best performing portfolio was the winner.
You can see how each of last year’s stocks fared in the table below. The 2016 contest ran from January 8, 2016 to December 31, 2016 and the table shows results for that period.

The Safer Canadian Dogs for 2016

Company
Total Return

National Bank (NA)
47.27%

TransCanada (TRP)
44.86%

Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS)
43…

Continue Reading On moneysense.ca »

TORONTO _ Financial planner Annie Kvick has one simple piece of advice for anyone struggling with money worries and debt stress in the new year: Get out of your head and start creating a financial plan.
“Most people actually have a pretty good understanding of their fixed costs. But they might not have written them down,” says Kvick, a certified money coach in North Vancouver, B.C.
“It’s easy to say, ‘Oh I think my cable bill is $145 a month,’ when it’s actually $175. All of these small things add up in the big run.”
Jamie Golombek, managing director of tax and estate planning for CIBC Wealth Advisory Services, concurs.
He points to a recent online survey conducted for the bank showing that while Canadians’ No. 1 goal for 2017 is to reduce debt, only a quarter also said they plan to create a household budget to do this.
Here are some tips for slaying the spending dragon and conquering debt.
Evaluate non-essential spending
When it comes to avoiding debt, one of the biggest obstacles Golombek has observed across all income levels is prioritizing discretionary over non-discretionary spending _ or put another way, failing to distinguish between needs and wants…

Continue Reading On canadianbusiness.com »

NEW YORK _ Last year was a fantastic one for fund investors, at least for those resilient enough to hold on through the stomach-churning turns the market took.
Most mutual funds, 87 per cent of those tracked by Morningstar, made money in 2016, even though many investors were bracing for the opposite early in the year. And the gains were widespread. Whether they focused on stocks of big U.S. companies, bonds from emerging markets or gold bars stored in a London vault, funds delivered positive returns to investors who stuck with them through the roller-coaster year.
Lurching up and down with the rest of the market was the largest mutual fund, Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index fund, which sits at the core of many 401(k) accounts. It sank at the start of the year on worries that a sharp slowdown in China’s economic growth would pull down the rest of the global economy. By the sixth week of the year, the fund had lost more than 11 per cent.
Surprises kept coming in ensuing months, giving uneasy investors even more temptation to bail…

Continue Reading On canadianbusiness.com »

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