This website aims to provide you with the information needed to shift your financial paradigm to become more conscious of your personal finances and intentional with your spending.
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Home Ownership – Not Always Better than Renting!
There’s a general understanding that homeownership is better than renting. Similarly, people commonly believe that property values always increase. Furthermore, and as discussed here, some believe that all home renovations can increase their property value more than the cost of the renovation, thus contributing to the amount of home ‘flippers’…
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Holiday Décor
In the comedic movie Christmas Vacation, Clark Griswold uncovers countless storage boxes from his garage, unpacks the strings of lights and festive yard ornaments they contain and spends hours decorating his house and snow-covered lawn. In the process, he has several mishaps with his ladder and at one point falls…
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Financial Family Goal Setting
Throughout our lives, we have various desires as individuals and as a family. It is important to set goals together with your partner to ensure that you are aware of each other’s ambitions so that you can work together to achieve them. Not only should your goals be discussed, but…
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Home Renovation Considerations
Remodelling a home might seem like a sure way to increase the value of your home, especially if you watch any home renovation shows on TV. The financial goal for any home renovation should be to maximize the increase in property value obtained by the work performed. Ideally, and what…
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You’re Closer to Poor than Rich!
The Forbes 400 is a yearly released list of the four hundred wealthiest Americans. In the 2023 issue, the richest, Elon Musk, was listed with a net worth of $251 Billion (LaFranco & Peterson-Withorn, 2023). In last place, you will find Daniel Sundheim, worth $2.9 Billion. This means that the…
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Is it what you want, or is it what is expected of you?
We are all influenced by those around us and what we see others doing. Sometimes, we will make life-changing decisions for no other reason than because we think it’s the right thing to do. As Don Draper asks his colleague Lane in the series Mad Men – is it what…
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Post-Secondary Education
Post-secondary education is generally worthwhile and earning potential increases with educational attainment. Table 13 below shows data from Carnevale et al. (2011) and indicates that over a forty-year career, someone with a master’s degree will have earned more than twice as much as someone with only a high school education.…
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Significance of Compound Growth
The most important factors influencing the growth of your retirement savings are the interest rate on your investments and the number of years you invest. The following chart illustrates the growth rate of an investment account that has $10,000 deposited into it each year from age 25 to 65. The…
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Tax on Tax
Most of us don’t consider that some of the taxes we pay – like sales taxes, fuel taxes, property taxes, and others – are paid from our after-tax income, meaning that we are being taxed on our money that has already been taxed! Sales tax rates vary by jurisdiction, and…
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Taxation – Jurisdiction Considerations
It is important to recognize all of the different taxes you pay. This is critical when considering moving to a new city or country. I was considering a move from Alberta, Canada to Texas, USA a few years ago. Texas to known to have low income taxes since income tax…
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Tax Brackets
Over the years, I have witnessed a common misconception about how income tax brackets work. In Canada, income taxation is progressive, which means that the tax rate increases the higher your income. The rungs on the proverbial taxation ladder are called tax brackets. The Table below is an example of…
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Meal Planning
Some of my friends and colleagues go out for lunch daily. Sometimes, I join them. My typical lunch meal is $15. With tax and tips, the average meal is around $19. When considering the cost of transportation to and from the restaurant, at 5 km away (10 km round trip)…
Fiscal Paradigm 