Are you looking for a financial advisor in Winnipeg?
If you’re looking to protect your financial security and build your financial future, you came to the right place!
As Winnipeg financial advisors, our goal is to help you safeguard your financial security, reduce debts, and accumulate assets.
As financial consumers, we are constantly bombarded with “opportunities to spend” our hard-earned money; in effect, most people find themselves in a situation where there really isn’t enough left-over to finance the things that are really important to them due to desire-based spending.
We help Winnipeg clients like you, realign spending toward things that are really important to you and your loved ones, by helping you uncover these important things, then develop a plan to ensure they do not get left behind.
Our Process
Financial Risk Management
Financial risk management safeguards your financial security; it gives you a solid financial foundation that helps mitigate or minimize the financial risks of serious life events that may jeopardize your financial security.
If you’re anything like most of us, your financial security depends on your ability to actively work to earn a living.
This means that if you lose your ability to actively work at a job, profession, or business, your income STOPS.
A well-planned financial risk management strategy takes into account the most common serious life events that could potentially affect you and your loved ones’ financial well-being and future.
When a person gets sick or becomes disabled, he or she may not be able to perform his or her regular activities to earn a living. Planning ahead ensures your financial well-being from life’s “what-ifs”, so they don’t become “what now”.
There are times when families find themselves in a situation where the person whom they rely upon for financial support is no longer around to provide for them.
Premature death is one of those difficult conversations that many of us shy away from, simply because we’re not comfortable talking or even thinking of the potential of an untimely passing.
“It won’t happen to me” isn’t a viable plan because it can’t guarantee your loved ones’ financial security and future.
Protecting your loved ones’ financial well-being is necessary even if you think that the chance of a premature death ever occurring to you or your partner is 1 out of 100.
Why Start with Insurance?
Insurance is an important part of your risk management strategy because it lays down the safety-net that protects your financial security against life events that are beyond your control.
A well-planned financial risk management strategy transfers or shares your financial risks to an insurance company so you need not worry about the loss of or reduced in income in case any of the following life events occur:
Any of these events may result in a financial loss or hardship to an individual or his/her loved ones.
Implementing the necessary insurance policies protect you and your loved ones from the potential financial risks of these life events.
Click here to book a financial risk management consultation with us!
Wills and Powers of Attorney
Wills and Powers of Attorney are legal documents that empower you to see through it that your assets and affairs are facilitated as you desire when you’re no longer able to due to death or incapacity through a lawyer and/or a trustee.
Who Needs a Will Anyway?
Last Will and Testament isn’t only the rich and the affluent, nor is it only for people in their senior years. That is wrong thinking, if you have young kids and assets or investments that are not protected by an insurance blanket, you need a will so the people whom you want to receive these assets will rightfully receive them and in a timely manner.
Why Is Power of Attorney Important?
A Power of Attorney is a legal document that empowers another individual to act on your behalf when it comes to financial matters should you lose the ability to make decisions on your own due to physical or mental incapacity.
Speak to your lawyer about putting these documents in place. If you don’t have one, we can recommend ones we trust.
Wealth Accumulation and Debt Reduction
Wealth is something we’re all trying to create, which can be achieved by focusing more of your resources on asset accumulation and debt reduction, instead of desire-based spending.
Emergency Fund
It’s been said that without employment insurance, most Canadian are two months away from bankruptcy in the event of a job loss or a business setback.
When it comes to wealth or asset accumulation, the first thing that we all must focus on is in building our emergency funds.
The common advice is to accumulate at least 6 months’ worth of income which one can aside either in a TFSA or simply a bank savings account.
An emergency fund helps take away the financial strain of emergency spendings such as vehicle and/or home repairs which helps you avoid dipping on credit cards and lines of credit for unplanned expenditures like these.
Your emergency fund will also come in handy in case of lay-offs, business setbacks, or a career transition.
An emergency fund can serve as your interim source of cash flow to take care of your basic costs of living and to pay the bills while you’re searching for another source of income.
Children’s Education Fund
As we all well know, a post-secondary, college or university education in Canada is one of the most expensive in the world but yet we can not deny the fact that our children will have a better shot in building their financial lives if they finish their post-secondary degrees.
The Registered Education Savings Plan or RESP is a great program for parents or grandparents who are looking to give their kids or grandchildren a head-start in life by investing in building their post-secondary education funds.
Without a saved-up post-secondary education fund, a child wishing to secure a post-secondary degree will have to go through the hassle of getting student loans to finance their education, borrow money from your home equity or try and work their way throughout their university years, hoping that they earn enough to pay for their tuition fees.
Just like any future financial obligations, the cost of a post-secondary degree can be financed by planning ahead; by saving an elected amount on a consistent basis to achieve the necessary educational funding, this way your children don’t have to start their financial lives already knee-deep in debt, right after school.
An RESP helps you build the necessary post-secondary education funds that your children need with the help of tax-deferred compounded growth and government grants. Yes, the government will actually help you build your children’s post-secondary funds when you save it in a registered education savings plan.
Building up the necessary education will lessen or completely eliminate the financial stress on your children when it’s time for them to take the steps toward their post-secondary education so they can focus more on their degrees, instead of worrying about tuition fees.
Retirement Planning
Most people never really think about saving for retirement until it’s about time to retire. As a result, 47% of Canadians require financial assistance in order to make ends meet at age 65.
If you’re 40 and just now realizing the importance of investing for retirement, the best time was 20-years ago, back to when you earned your first paycheck but like many of us, you may have missed it as most hardworking Canadian professionals did.
Come to think of it, most Canadian adults are pretty much on the same boat when it comes to their financial education after finishing school. This is due to the fact that financial literacy was never taught in school.
The school equips us with the education and skills we need to empower us to make a living; unfortunately, our traditional educational system never taught us what to do with our money after we earn it, how money works, how to make it grow and how to make it work for us so we can eventually stop working for money and instead have that money work hard for us.
Whatever age you’re at right now, the second-best time to start building wealth for retirement is now!
Most Canadians actually save too little while most live paycheck to paycheck regardless of how much they make from their jobs or professions; putting off or entirely crossing-out retirement planning, instead they put their hopes for retirement on government or company pensions.
Remember, the government can only support so many retirees and your company will only give you benefits that are just enough for you to keep working for them.
If you think that you’re unable to set aside a portion of your income to accumulate wealth for retirement, either you have a spending problem or you have an earning problem. Either way, these have to be addressed if you’re planning to build your future.
According to then Finance Minister, late Jim Flaherty; while it’s good that we have government pensions in place, the problem is that it’s too small. As opposed to popular belief, you can’t actually (and you shouldn’t) retire on government pensions alone. These programs are in place to supplement our retirement income, they were never designed to fully support us financially at retirement. Rather, it’s up to us to build our own retirement fund, with or without government pensions.
It is expected that almost half of the population will not have saved enough money for retirement.
Saving and investing early on for retirement in a tax-deferred program such as an RRSP sets you apart from the crowd.
Remember…
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now. Click To Tweet
The sooner you start saving and growing funds for retirement, the sooner you can retire and even if you don’t plan to retire at all; having money working for you at old age means you can still work at a job, business or career because you want to but not because you have to.
Conclusion
If you’ve reached this part, I hope that you’ve found value in what we do and in this article.
I also hope that all this information was not overwhelming. The ideal scenario is that you have all aspects of financial risk management and wealth accumulation in place but then as your financial advisor, we will not force all of these in one sitting. We can start with what is most important to you and gradually move up toward these other important things.
Our goal as Winnipeg financial advisors is to help you protect your financial security and build your financial future through practical risk management and wealth accumulation strategies that fit your situation and goals.