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Building A Wealth Snowball
A lot of focus gets placed on the BIG personal finance decisions, buying a home, using a TFSA versus an RRSP, which investments to use etc etc. But really, it’s the small decisions, the ones we make daily, weekly, monthly, these are the decisions that have the largest impact on our personal finances.
When we look at someone’s financial journey, it’s typically not made up of leaps and bounds but rather small steps and steady progress. There typically isn’t one defining moment that leads to someone’s wealth. It’s usually a repeated process of saving and investing.
Like a snowball, wealth usually starts small, but it builds quickly. It generates more and more momentum as it gets larger until it becomes something unstoppable.
To build a wealth snowball is simple. It requires commitment in the beginning, with new contributions made on a regular basis. It requires growth, those contributions need to be invested and any investment income needs to be reinvested. And it requires time, time for the wealth snowball to gain momentum.
Given those three factors, at some point in the future, the wealth snowball will be driven not by contributions but by growth. New contributions will be dwarfed by annual investment growth and the snowball will grow faster and faster.
The important thing when building a wealth snowball is to stay on track, ensure spending is less than income, ensure the leftover gets invested regularly, and keep focused on the long-term because it takes a bit of time before growth overtakes contributions.
Managing Cash Flow Using The Digital Envelope Budget System
Whether it’s a torrent or a trickle, having a system to manage cash flow can help make money easy. One of the most time-consuming things about personal finances is managing income and spending. But what if you had a budgeting system that helped you manage that monthly cash flow? And what if that system was free, easy to set up, and simple to maintain?
Managing income and spending is the best way to achieve financial freedom. It doesn’t take much to go from financial ruin to financial success. It can be as little as $10 per day. It’s not about stellar investment returns, or risky real estate investing, or earning six figure salary, it’s all about paying attention to income and spending.
But old methods of managing cash flow need to be updated for the digital age. Cash is less prevalent, and credit and debit transactions dominate. Any system for managing income and spending needs to be digital, automated, and easy to set up and maintain.
The envelope budget is a classic way to manage income and spending. It’s a proven way to manage cash flow and it’s easy to understand. Money gets allocated to certain envelopes and spent during the month. As money in an envelope gets low this provides a signal to slow down on spending until the envelope gets replenished on the next payday.
Thanks to no-fee online bank accounts, the envelope budget can be easily adapted to the digital age.
But it’s not as simple as just creating a few new bank accounts. To manage cash flow with the digital envelope budget system it helps if you have a budget already created. This may require tracking your spending for a few weeks or months. Or it may require looking at past statements. It also requires an online no-fee bank account.
This is how you set up the digital envelope budget system.
The Cost Of Raising A Child
Children are expensive. That’s something we can all appreciate. But just how expensive are they? What is the cost of raising a child? What is the cost of raising 2, 3, 4+ children?
For new parents, or soon-to-be parents, the cost of raising a child can be a real guessing game. As parents to two young children, my wife and I felt the same uncertainty when we started our family. We had to guess about how much it would cost and what kind of expenses we needed to anticipate.
We anticipated some costs, especially in the first few years, but we never took the time to look at the total cost of raising a child, we just didn’t know where to begin.
As many parents can attest to, raising a child is expensive. There are many costs when raising a child. From diapers to daycare, food to formula, the total cost of raising a child is shockingly large.
The estimated cost of raising a child in Canada is $203,550! Wow!
Plus, this estimate doesn’t even include educations savings like RESP contributions. Add in enough RESP contributions to max out the $7,200 government grant and you’re at a total cost of $239,550 to raise a child in Canada!!!
With each child costing nearly a quarter million dollars, anticipating these costs becomes a very important part of a financial plan. It’s also important to realize this this quarter million is very front loaded, with a lot of the cost coming in the early years. For new families this is important.
When building a plan, we want to anticipate these costs on a year-by-year basis, we want to understand when these expenses will occur, and we want to plan for possible cash flow issues down the road.
We also want to help new parents understand that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, because for parents with 1, 2, or 3+ young children, the cost of daycare and diapers can feel pretty overwhelming.
Lastly, we also want to anticipate government benefits and tax credits, both can help offset a large percentage of the cost of raising a child. This is an important part of a family plan and can be worth thousands of dollars per year, so we don’t want to ignore them.