Personal Finance
Money Ideas I Hope More Canadians Embrace
I have no aspirations to write a book, become a YouTube star, or start trending on TikTok. I don’t want an online course empire or a podcast studio or a public speaking circuit. None of that has ever appealed to me. What has kept me going, year after year, is the quiet work: writing articles…
Read MoreHow To Crush Your RRSP Contributions Next Year
*Updated for October 2025* If you’re a high-income earner staring at a mountain of unused RRSP room, you’re not alone. Many Canadians with strong salaries struggle to come up with enough cash flow to max out their RRSP deduction limit each year. And while we can debate whether middle- and low-income earners are better off…
Read MoreA Young Adult’s Smart Guide to Money
(What I wish I’d known at 18, 24, and 30 – from parents and grandparents who’ve been there, and a financial planner who can translate those experiences into actionable advice for today.) If you’re in your late teens or twenties, you don’t need an “investment guy”, a six-figure income, or a meme stock or hot…
Read MoreWhy We Stopped Saving So Much and Started Living
One lesson I’ve learned from my retired clients is that it’s human nature to feel anxious about spending money – especially when the paycheque stops and you’re drawing down your own savings and investments. After decades of watching account balances go up, it’s deeply uncomfortable to watch them go the other way. It just doesn’t…
Read MoreMental Accounting: When Your Money Mind Plays Tricks on You
We like to think we make rational decisions with our money. But time and again, we fall into predictable traps—especially when it comes to how we frame our finances. One of the biggest culprits? Mental accounting. It’s a behavioural bias where we treat money differently depending on its source, use, or location—even though, on paper,…
Read MoreWill AI Replace Financial Planners?
I like to think of myself as an emotionless robot when it comes to investing. Buy a single, low-cost, globally diversified, and risk-appropriate asset allocation ETF – contribute to it regularly, and move on with your life. It’s the same mindset I encourage my clients to adopt. Focus on what you can control, make evidence-based…
Read MoreTFSA Contribution Limit And Overview
The federal government kept the annual TFSA contribution limit at $7,000 for 2025 – the same limit we had in 2024. It’s still good news for Canadian savers and investors, who as of January 1, 2025, will have a cumulative lifetime TFSA contribution limit of $102,000. The Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA) was introduced in…
Read MoreIs Outsourcing The Key To Happiness?
In his best selling book, The 4-Hour Workweek, author Tim Ferriss explains how outsourcing your to-do list can result in a more ideal work-life balance. Instead of being glued to your phone and email like most busy professionals and entrepreneurs, Ferris recommends delegating the time-consuming, unpleasant, or simply boring tasks in both your professional and…
Read MoreBuild If/Then Statements Into Your Financial Plan
Anyone familiar with Microsoft Excel knows how useful “if/then” statements can be to make comparisons under certain conditions. An IF statement can either be true or false. An if/then statement can be extremely useful in financial planning. Here are three examples of how to build “if/then” statements into your financial plan. When your income is…
Read MoreMental Accounting and How We Spend Money
We all have quirky behaviours when it comes to managing our money. One trick we fall victim to is called mental accounting. We separate our money into different types of mental accounts, with different rules, depending upon how we get it, how we spend it, and how it makes us feel. An easy example is…
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