All posts by Jonathan Chevreau

The Greatest Prospector in the World

7ca4643d950f4bd09e96de75113a3031-GP_Cover_frontThe Greatest Prospector in the World is the title of a new work of “Business Fiction” focusing on the six “secrets” of sales prospecting success. The author is Ken Dunn, CEO and Founder of Las Vegas based Next Century Publishing.

The six secrets are slowly revealed over the course of a charming tale that begins in the year 1910, a story Dunn describes in the book’s subtitle as “A Historically Accurate Parable on Creating Success in Sales, Business, & Life.

For those who wish to skip on to the six secrets, they are laid out in the short Afterword, in which Dunn acknowledges a literary debt to Jim Stovall’s Ultimate Life Series and Og Mandino’s classic The Greatest Salesman in the World.

Dunn himself is no slouch in the world of sales prospecting: after an early career in police work he started businesses in property management, finance, direct sales and publishing.

You can find more at the book’s web site, www.greatestprospector.com. Also check out Dunn’s recently launched ReadersLegacy.com, which is a kind of Facebook for book lovers. In an interview in his Toronto offices, Dunn described Reader’s Legacy as “Facebook meets Amazon.” The site even features a kind of literary currency called “Lit Coins,” (reminiscent of Bit Coins).

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Kenn Dunn (Twitter.com)

The 6 secrets of Sales Prospecting

I’ll reveal the titles of the secrets but you really need to read the story to get the context. As the cover image shows, it’s all about prospecting for gold nuggets.

Here are the six secrets:

1.) Dress for the Weather

2.) Know what you’re looking for

3.) Use the right tools

4.) Get in the River, Even when you don’t want to

5.) Make it Fun

6.) Work Hard for Six Days, Rest for One

 

 

 

Weekly wrap: Lower TFSA limits, an essential retirement guide, using ETFs to hedge risk

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TFSA slayer: Finance Minister Bill Morneau (co-author of The Real Retirement)

As the Tuesday papers reported, the middle-class tax cut and lower annual TFSA contribution limits kick in as of Jan. 1 2016. As the FP’s Garry Marr wrote Tuesday I suppose we can be grateful the Liberals didn’t cut the TFSA program altogether and it could have been worse: they might have cancelled out the “bonus” $10,000 TFSA room we received in 2015. A truly churlish move might have been to allow only $500 in 2016, although the administration nightmares and hordes of angry voters — 11 million of them have TFSAs and more than half liked the higher limits — would surely have created a backlash.

The other tiny bit of silver lining is that the $5,500 limit is again linked to inflation (the $10,000 limit was not), so we can at least hope that the limit will eventually rise to $6,000 and beyond if inflation rises in earnest. Of course, that will be another problem.

In any case, as the Hub showed on Tuesday, the Working Canadians petition is now live at  https://petitions.parl.gc.ca, after Conservative MP Peter Kent (Thornhill) sponsored Catherine Swift’s petition. It will be up until early April. After just a week, it has just under 3,000 signatures, on top of the 7,000 from the earlier Working Canadian petition. See also my FP piece that day: TFSA cancels out benefits of ‘middle class’ tax cuts, critics warn.

I find it interesting that those of us who support the petition all tend to be 60-plus and still working. That applies to Catherine and Peter, though I’m not sure about Bill Tufts, who also wrote a Hub blog on the topic as it relates to pension parity.

The two-tiered society

Sick man with cold virus at work
Public-sector or private-sector worker?

I actually had a bad cold all week and had to force myself to continue working. It occurred to me that this was a stark contrast to recent news stories about how many extra sick days public-sector workers take, especially on Mondays and Fridays in the summer.

Couple that phenomenon with the disparity between public-sector and private-sector pensions and it’s clear we have a two-tiered society: those in the public sector who take plenty of paid vacations and sick days and who can retire in their late 50s; and those in the private sector who keep toiling well into their 60s and are reluctant to stop working even when they’re sick. (which is what I am as I write these words: hope it doesn’t show!). Continue Reading…

Time for year-end tax planning: start with CRA My Account

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Robin Taub

Here’s my latest blog for the Financial Post, titled Here’s how to find all your tax info in one place.

It features chartered accountant Robin Taub (pictured), who is also a spokesperson for Turbo Tax.

I know that filing personal tax returns seems impossibly far away, considering that winter has yet to begin in earnest. But as Taub points out, there are only three weeks left in 2015 and if you want to minimize tax owing for this calendar year, waiting until 2016 may be too late for certain actions: notably making charitable contributions or making a contribution to an RESP in order to qualify for the accompanying grant.

December 31 is the deadline for those but there’s an earlier practical deadline of December 24th for those who want to engage in a last-minute bout of tax-loss selling or booking offsetting gains. That’s because it takes three days for trades to settle and there aren’t a lot of working days left to trade between Christmas and New Year’s.

But Taub’s number-one tip is that the easiest way to get organized early for the next tax-filing season is to sign up for the Canada Revenue Agency’s My Account for Individuals. The FP blog goes into some detail on that.

TFSA rollbacks will hurt the needy

Also in the FP today is an article by public policy consultant Neil Mohindra entitled TFSA rollbacks will hurt the needy. Continue Reading…

Liberals ignore expanded petition, steamroller TFSA limit back to $5,500 for 2016

Canadian Tax-Free Savings Account concept word cloudOttawa is moving to steamroller the old $5,500 TFSA limit back into place by Jan. 1, 2016, less than a week after the federal clerk of petitions posted the government’s version of the Working Canadians’ TFSA petition to keep the annual contribution limit on Tax-free Savings Accounts (TFSAs) at the current $10,000 level.

Details also in my column in Tuesday’s Financial Post or online, headlined TFSA cap cancels out benefits of ‘middle class’ tax cut, critics warn.

The URL for the federal clerk of petitions’ TFSA petition is at https://petitions.parl.gc.ca

The Hub has been following this petition since its creation in the aftermath of the Liberal Government’s electoral victory.

Last Thursday morning, Working Canadians issued an update that was posted at the Hub’s sister site, Findependence.TV, because the Hub itself was down for maintenance that day. It was headlined Majority of Canadians support leaving TFSA limit at $10,000, poll shows.

Updated 3:15 pm.

Working Canadians issued two press releases today. The first was at 5 am under embargo and appeared on the original version of this blog. It is still there at the bottom, but we have added above it one issued mid-afternoon today:

Dear Working Canadians Supporters:

You may have heard that late yesterday afternoon the new federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau said the government was planning to proceed with reducing the Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA) limit from $10,000 to $5,500. As you may know, Working Canadians has waged a very successful campaign over the last few weeks to encourage Canadians to support leaving the TFSA limit at the current level. The support from Canadians of all income levels, of all age groups, and even of those supporting every political party has been overwhelmingly positive. Despite their claims to the contrary, if the government reduces the TFSA limit they will be doing so against the best interests of the vast majority of Canadians.

After we launched the initial Working Canadians electronic petition about a month ago to encourage the government to retain the Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA) limit at $10,000, the federal government very recently created its own online petition process Continue Reading…

David Trahair’s contrarian stance: Be a loaner, not an owner

125_Enough_Bull_High_Res_Cover_FinalBy Jonathan Chevreau

Financial Independence Hub

In this summer’s series on the 7 eternal truths of personal finance, one of the articles was entitled Be an Owner, Not a Loaner, which reflects the usual financial industry advice that stocks are more likely to generate long-term investment returns than cash or bonds.

There is of course a contrary view to this eternal truth and it’s best contained in the new second edition of David Trahair’s book, Enough Bull, originally published early in 2009, right at the bottom of the financial crisis..

Trahair, a chartered accountant and author, could as easily have titled his book Be a Loaner, Not an Owner, because he’s adamant that stocks (i.e. equities), whether individual or pooled through mutual funds or ETFs, are just too risky for the average person.

The book cover includes a small image of a bull (as in a steer), so clearly the title Enough Bull is a double entendre: as in no more bullish prognostications on the stock market, as well as no more bovine excrement, whether dispensed by the animals or financial advisors.

Skeptical about the financial industry and its central belief in stocks Continue Reading…