Monthly Archives: December 2017

Tips for building brand awareness online

Posted By |

By Emily Jones

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Marketing your online business isn’t necessarily a cut and dry endeavor. For instance, you may have the best products on the planet but are having trouble getting them in front of the right people. Or you’ve found the right people but are unable to communicate with them clearly. Either way, you won’t be making any money.

In the marketing world, there’s no quick fix to success: there are things you should know before choosing your business growth strategies and the following brand building strategies can help you take your efforts to the next level.

The Internet is now pervasive

There’s no denying it: the Internet dominates virtually every aspect of our lives. Thus, it comes as no surprise that it has become very a popular and effective marketing medium. Take control of this monster with these two tips:

Leverage social media

Sites like Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook have the potential to boost the popularity of your brand exponentially. But to get the most out of these sites, it’s important to know which one works best for your brand. For instance:

  • Pinterest and Instagram are best for sites with a lot of pics
  • B2Bs do best on Twitter
  • Small businesses in creative industries do well on Instagram

To succeed, you must create a creative and engaging marketing campaign to help you stand apart from your competition. Do so by posting updates several times a day to make sure you are engaging with your audience on a regular basis.

Embrace influencer marketing

Influencers are well liked and trusted by their audience, making an endorsement by them very valuable. To take advantage of this, find key influencers who are already in your industry. Just make sure that their business complements (rather than competes) with your product or service.

Popular influencers are being courted by my many companies. Give yourself an advantage by researching them: this will give you an idea of what you can do capture their interest and get them to listen to your story.

You may also want to create a couple of influencer strategies. In this way, if your desired influencer decides to go another way, all is not lost. You have other options to choose from.

Offline Brand Building

Although most of your brand building marketing work will be done online, there’s still something to be said about offline marketing. Continue Reading…

5 ways to turn your Savings into Capital Gains

Posted By |

By Sia Hasan

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Continuously adding to your savings account is a responsible and astute financial step towards a comfortable retirement. Unfortunately interest rates offered by banks on standard savings accounts make for really slow growth, which is barely enough to keep up with inflation. Fortunately, there are other investment options out there that can increase your money at a more decent pace, one of which is stocks. Here are five techniques to turning your spare cash into a portfolio that grows both in capital gains and dividend income.

1.) Start Small

You don’t need to pour all of your savings into stocks right away. Going about it slowly can minimize risk. For example, if you have $10,000 as your savings, start buying 10 to 20 shares of stocks per month. Consider increasing your order size or frequency of purchase as you gain more experience or as you get more data about specific companies. If company XYZ’s stock price has solid momentum, consider buying more of it.

2.) Dollar Cost Averaging

You can also do dollar cost averaging, which basically involves setting a budget to buy stock each month. For example, if you have $1,000 to invest per month and company XYZ’s stock costs $50 for this month, you buy 20 shares of it. The next month, it costs $40 per share, so you buy 25 shares. The month after that, it actually increase to $100, so you buy 10 shares for that month and so on.

3.) Strategize according to your Lifestyle

A methodical approach to investing is key to growing your investment portfolio consistently. Strategy removes emotions from the equation, which for an investor can be a detrimental quality or set of qualities to bring in the stock market. Figure out what strategy best fits you. Someone who is saving money month after month is probably occupied with a full-time job; hence there are limited hours in the day for monitoring prices and current positions. Continue Reading…

The destructive effects of poor Human Resource Planning

Posted By |

 By Dr. Yvonne Foster

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

The success of every business depends on so many things, one of which is strategic human resource planning. If you are a start-up organization, you will benefit greatly by taking the advice of an HR consultancy firm or a trained HR agent who will pilot the affairs of your organization.

Poor human resource planning has a long-term and immediate influence on management policies, employee recruitment, corporate profitability and organizational functioning. In this post, we are going to talk about effects of poor human resource planning:

Poor HR planning and Management

If you have a poor or incompetent human resource department, it will have a negative impact on your organization, there will be no or poor training and re-training of the employees. Also, if your executive management does not pay enough attention to HR best practice it will lead to poor decision making process and critical mistakes. If you have a poor HR system, you will be liable to have employees that won’t have the best interests of your organization at heart.

Unmotivated employees

Having a poor HR system has so many drawbacks. It can lead to poor team building and personality conflicts, and most experienced employees may be uncomfortable with the work environment.

Adversely, there would be gross underutilization of their skills. Poor HR planning will give rise to lack of incentives, poor motivation, poor performance, and perhaps also the production of poor products and services.

Employee requirement mismatch

Recruiting and hiring the right talent is a continuous process. An HR professionalwith poor communication skills and lackadaisical attitude will be unable to address organizational and workforce requirements.

Continue Reading…

Why “Topping up to bracket” makes sense if you’re temporarily in a low tax bracket

Posted By |

My latest column in Wednesday’s Globe & Mail looks at a strategy called “Topping up to Bracket,” which can be useful to anyone who is temporarily in a lower tax bracket.

Click on the highlighted headline to access the online version, assuming you have Globe subscriber privileges or haven’t exceeded the monthly free click quota: A strong tax case for early RRSP withdrawals.

When might you be “temporarily” in a lower tax bracket than usual? This can of course happen when you lose a job or if you’re in your Sixties and transitioning between full employment (typically earning in higher tax brackets) and Semi-Retirement, when it’s tempting to “bask” in lower tax brackets.

Temporary because as Semi-Retirement progresses, you can end up moving back into higher tax brackets: for example, if you start to receive Old Age Security (OAS) at 65, then take Canada Pension Plan (CPP) a few years later, these are both taxable sources of income.

And the big hit can come at the end of the year you turn 71, when RRSPs must be converted to Registered Retirement Income Funds (RRIFs) or else annualized or cashed out. RRIFs entail forced annual withdrawal rates that keep rising between your 70s and your mid 90s.

So that makes “Topping up to Bracket” (a term used in a BMO Wealth Institute paper on the topic, published around 2013) a strategy not to be ignored. In practice it means making sure that in those low-earning years you at least bring into your hands each and every year the roughly $12,000 of untaxed earnings that’s called the Basic Personal Amount (BPA). And as the G&M column explains, it’s also a good idea to at least bring in the dollars that are in the lowest tax bracket (15% federally, 5% in Ontario), or roughly $42,000. There are of course higher tax brackets above that but the law of diminishing returns starts to kick in beyond the $42,000.

Note too that this is a “use it or lose it” proposition. If for example a year went by that you failed even to bring in even that $12,000 income that would not have been taxed, you can’t carry forward the opportunity to benefit from it the following year. You will of course have another opportunity for the BPA that year but it won’t double up because you neglected to earn low- or non-taxed income the previous year. Continue Reading…

Do men and women have different Savings Habits?

Posted By |

By Danielle Kubes

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

In an online survey about savings habits, financial comparison site Ratehub.ca reports that although Canadian men and women save almost the same amount of money, men have a greater level of confidence in their financial planning.

Inspired by 2014 Statistics Canada data that says Canadian women have lower financial literacy scores than men and were less likely to consider themselves “financially knowledgeable” (31% of women versus 43% of men), Ratehub.ca set out to discover if there truly is a gender divide. 

The company digitally surveyed a random sample of 1,087 Canadians in November, with respondents self-identifying their gender.

“Our survey revealed that while men and women differ in aspects of their financial planning, at the core, their personal finance goals and concerns are nearly identical,” the report says.

Both genders have similar financial goals

Indeed, both genders report almost the exact same financial goals. At the top of list of priorities is retirement, followed by travel and then having an emergency fund.

Both men and women prefer to save and invest in registered accounts, especially the registered retirement savings plan (RRSP) and tax-free savings account (TFSA). What they choose to invest in within these accounts — guaranteed income certificates (GICs), exchange traded funds (ETFs), stocks, or other products — is unknown.

Yet men and women diverge most in how confident they are that they’ll have enough money to retire: less than half of women, 41%, say they’re confident compared to over half of men surveyed, at 56%.

Odd, because both genders save almost the same amount of their salaries, with women saving 26% and men 29%.

The gap could potentially be explained in how able they are to grow those savings through investing. Eighty-five per cent of men invest their money, while only 76% of women do.

Of those that do invest, less women than men self-manage their investments, potentially indicating another worrisome lack of confidence in their financial knowledge.

This is supported by the original Statistics Canada data, which found women were less likely to state they “know enough about investments to choose the right ones that are suitable for their circumstances.”

Confidence doesn’t mean financial knowledge

But does confidence translate to actual financial knowledge? Apparently not. When Statistics Canada quizzed Canadians who rated themselves financially literate, one in every three women failed, while one in every four men failed. Continue Reading…