How having an advisor can bring you closer to reaching your financial goals. Ever notice how many of life’s biggest goals have some financial component? Sure, you can master a foreign language or run a marathon without making a significant financial commitment. But try buying a home, starting a family or helping your kids go to university. Same goes for retiring early or leaving a legacy. Without disciplined planning and saving, these goals can just slip away. Like many other Canadians who are juggling a job and a busy family life, you probably don’t have time to figure it all out for yourself. Then again, you may feel you don’t have the expertise to tackle the complexities of your financial

Human oddities From scratching an imaginary itch to mumbling to ourselves, many of us do some strange things, often without even realizing it. Here are some weird behaviours that are more common than you might think. Reading an entire page only to realize you checked out after the first sentence. This usually happens because you’re distracted, or your mind is elsewhere. Even though your eyes scan the pages due to muscle memory, you aren’t retaining a lot of information because your short-term memory is filled with too much sensory information. Turning down the volume to see better in the dark. If you have ever gotten lost while driving at night, this probably sounds familiar. Of course, turn

A common mistake is to make decisions based on emotions. In good times, investors are excited, they want to invest more and often “buy high." When markets turn negative, investors become fearful and decide to cut their losses and “sell low." The investing emotional roller coaster shows what an investor may experience as their investment rises and falls. The key is to stay disciplined and committed to your long-term investment plan to avoid riding the emotional roller coaster. There are ways to manage emotions when you encounter uncertainty in the markets. Speak to us – we can help provide the knowledge you need to help you stay focused on your long-term goals. Discipline is what it takes to

How you can help adult children without jeopardizing your own financial future. With the cost of housing and education continuing to rise in Canada, it’s more difficult for younger generations to get established. While average hourly earnings (adjusted for inflation) rose approximately $3 between 1977 and 2016, average housing prices have more than doubled, and significantly more than doubled in many of Canada’s urban centres. The cost of a university education has almost doubled just since the early 1990s, with tuition rising by 3.7 per cent annually over the past decade. It should be no surprise then that the number of adults aged 25 and older living with a parent has almost doubled since

How to keep your credit rating in good standing during the holidays. The holidays can be a magical, yet expensive, time of year for many Canadians. In this season of giving, we are often tempted to overspend on gifts for loved ones. We attend more parties and social gatherings with friends, family and work colleagues. And with the kids on break from school, it’s also a popular time of year for travel. Many people finance their holiday fun with credit cards. In fact, six out of 10 Canadians are willing to go into debt to purchase gifts. It can be easy for holiday spending to quickly spiral out of control, and before you know it, you receive a credit card bill in January that you aren’t able t