Your Road Map
To Financial
Control
for Life

Protecting yourself in the present is also key. The richest asset in life is your health. Critical illness insurance, disability insurance and a range of other healthcare insurance products provide living benefits that help you take care of you in case of accident, illness, or injury so you can focus your energy on recovery rather than worry about finances and managing expenses.

You might not have control over life’s unexpected surprises, but you have the control to protect yourself and loved ones with insurance.

Identifying productive expenses that increase your value and productivity will help you cultivate the lifestyle you truly desire as opposed to destructive expenses that don’t align with your needs, goals, dreams or values. Destructive expenses include things like overdraft fees, credit card loans, and not living within your means. Productive expenses are life-enhancing and value-based such as investing in education to increase your skills and in your business. Classifying expenses will go a long way towards changing your financial mindset and getting you out of debt.

Equally important is learning how to make your money work harder for you in the most efficient way possible. A good financial plan will look at how you can optimize your cash flow to your advantage so you not only pay down debt faster and growth wealth safely for the future, but recoup more of what you earn in the present by paying out less in interest and taxes to others.

We take building a cash reserve a step further by teaching you non-traditional financial savings strategies that grow your money safely with contractual guaranteed growth over the long-term. As inflation increases and the cost of living rises, your money needs to be continually growing to adjust to these conditions, otherwise you will likely use credit to finance many of life’s big purchases, getting yourself further into debt.

Building a lifelong cash reserve provides other benefits such as liquidity and the flexibility to access your money when you need for what you want. Your child’s education, that dream vacation you always wanted to take—it’s your choice.

Traditional investment savings plans such as RRSPs and RESPs force you to “lock in” your money and penalize you for early withdrawal at a time when you probably need your money the most. These investments just don’t provide you with the same level of financial liquidity, flexibility and security as building your own cash reserve based on a safe, long-term, guaranteed growth savings strategy. It’s like learning to become your own personal banker.

But RRSPs are federal-government sponsored savings plans that give you negligible financial control or flexibility. Even though you are investing your own money, the government dictates how much money you can put in and when you can withdraw it. If you withdraw money prior to retirement, the government penalizes you. That’s money you lose and they gain.

And depending on the way your RRSP is diversified and invested, market volatility could cause you to not only lose your gains but your principal too. Since 2000, the stock market has experienced losses of 49%+ from two separate crashes. The higher your risk tolerance the greater amount of money you stand to lose. As a result, it is hard to determine what the minimum guaranteed value of your RRSP plan will be the day you tap into it. You are left with an uncertain fund to rely on in retirement.

You may benefit from the tax deduction on RRSP plan contributions and the tax deferral on gains but the real tax benefit will go to the government when every dollar you withdraw will be taxed at a rate that could be substantially higher than rates today, especially when you factor in inflation. If you are in lower tax rate when you retire, you may be poorer than you want to be.