Trusted Regina Financial Advisor Chris Worby talks about Household Finances and the 25 % rule.

2. Aug 2016 Trusted Regina Regina Financial Services, TRUSTED TIPS

Finding the shortest and safest route to any of your dreams requires planning and only with a carefully thought out financial plan can you be sure to make the most of your resources and to protect against risks along the way. At Worby Wealth Management, Chris will do his best to help you achieve those dreams with a plan that is tailored to your specific needs and based on your individual situation.

Let Trusted Regina Financial Advisor Chris Worby of Worby Wealth Management help you live your dream!

Expert Financial Advice Regarding Household Finances.

The truth is that financial management is boring. I mean, it sounds interesting when you watch movies and they’re yelling, “Buy, Buy! Sell, sell!” But this behaviour does not make you rich – in fact, it can have the opposite effect.

Smart people understand one thing – tactics do not win the battle, logistics do. And one of my best pieces of advice is the 25% rule.

It essentially breaks down like this: If you want to attain financial security contribute 25% of your net monthly income towards your net worth. It is very important that financial security has very little to do with being ‘rich’ but everything to do with having the resources available to have options throughout your life.

Net worth is composed of two things: Assets and Liabilities. I think of liabilities as the hole requiring filling and think of the assets, as the mountain you build with your resources.

A few notes about each. Paying down credit cards does not fit into the asset/liability described above. Credit cards are consumption. If you have already made errors and are carrying balances, then you need a plan to pay them down and it can be worked into a liability repayment plan. However, further credit card debt becomes consumption rather than a liability.

Big expenses – trips, renovations, etc. should be paid for with funds that have been saved in advance; they should not be financed. The reasons are many. First, once you start down the ‘financing fun’ road, it can be hard to maintain discipline. Second, a trip paid for and fully funded is less stressful. Third, something you pay for as you go tends to be better planned out and fits your budget – and studies show that planning your spending is almost as fun as the actual spending.

Building assets is then the ‘exciting’ part, right? “Buy, buy, sell, sell” and all that. Actually, it is very hard to get rich quickly and fairly easy to get rich slowly. Using pension plans and RRSP, TFSAs and RESPs to accomplish your family’s plans can be done well over time but the ‘get rich quick' schemes rarely work out.

Find a strategy you are comfortable with and run it as a discipline. If you are going to buy and hold, never deviate. If you are going to move with certain market cycles like a momentum system, or act as a value manager, do this and never change it. Make sure you do your homework upfront to get a working system and then never change. Mistakes in investing come from emotion.

But none of that happens without a strategy – and the spending strategy that works best is using 25% of your net, monthly income to build your net worth. Not only do you have funds available to build assets and pay down liabilities but you also create a buffer in case something bad happens. You aren’t living at capacity with your finances, you have options.

And that is financial security.

Some of the services that Worby Wealth Management can help you with:

TRUSTED REGINA FINANCIAL ADVISOR Chris Worby from Worby Wealth Management helps you live your dream!

Trusted Regina mortgage professional shares a tip on reverse mortgages and empowering older homeowners.

27. Jun 2016 bonnied Regina Legal & Professional Services, Regina Mortgages, TRUSTED TIPS

When most of us dream of retirement, we imagine ourselves in our homes - sharing a meal with family or just relaxing in a comfortable spot.

But retirement can also bring financial strain. Seniors often face the challenge of managing with less cash flow than they anticipated or coping with unforeseen expenses.

A Trusted Regina Mortgage Broker empowers older Canadian homeowners with smart, simple ways to use the value of their home during retirement.

For over 25 years The Canadian Home Income Plan (CHIP) our reverse mortgage solution has helped thousands of older homeowners enjoy more financial flexibility without having to sell or move. CHIP might be the solution for you.

CHIP Home Income Plan is a home equity loan available exclusively to Canadian homeowners to convert a portion of your home equity into tax-free cash. But, unlike a traditional loan or mortgage, you never have to make a payment until you choose to move or sell – although you can make payments if you so choose.

The CHIP Home Income Plan has other advantages over traditional loans or mortgages. For example, there are no income qualifications and once you receive the loan, it can never be recalled.

It's called a Reverse Mortgage because unlike a traditional mortgage in which you make regular payments to a lender, the CHIP Home Income Plan pays you! You do not have to make any payments — principal or interest – for as long as you or your spouse lives in your home.

Features of a CHIP Reverse Mortgage:

Homeowners age 55 and older
No payments are ever required
No Income qualifications
No Credit requirements
Qualify for up to 50% of the value of the home
Money can be received as a lump sum, or over time or combination
Owner maintains title
They can sell or move at anytime
Receive the money tax free

Chris Worby a Trusted Regina Financial Expert from Worby Wealth Management shares a tip on Too Much Stuff

10. May 2015 Trusted Regina Regina Financial Services, TRUSTED TIPS

Finding the shortest and safest route to any of your dreams requires planning and only with a carefully thought out financial plan can you be sure to make the most of your resources and to protect against risks along the way. At Worby Wealth Management, Chris will do his best to help you achieve those dreams with a financial plan that is tailored to your specific needs and based on your individual situation.

Let TRUSTED REGINA's FINANCIAL ADVISOR Chris Worby from Worby Wealth Management help you live your dream!

Here Chris Shares A Tip About Too Much Stuff:

Too Much Stuff? What to keep…

If you’re like me, you find yourself with stuff – lots of stuff – all over the place. In a lifetime, we accumulate and accumulate and it’s hard to know what to throw out.

By no means exhaustive, this article has some good ways to catalogue stuff and may give you some ideas on how to keep your stuff sorted.

The following is an entertaining article:

George Carlin and the new retirement minimalism

It is finally spring. Among the rituals of spring is spring cleaning.

Comedian and colorful social observer George Carlin described a house as "just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.” Spring-cleaning is an opportunity to sort that stuff — making the option of downsizing possible, ageing-in-place easier, or simply helping family members make sense out of all that “stuff” you have accumulated for decades.

Over an adult lifetime, you collect your stuff, family stuff and legal stuff. Here are some ideas on what to do with it.

Your stuff is everything under your roof. However, as you approach retirement, or may already be in retirement, that stuff makes life and future housing choices more difficult. The more you have, the more there is to maintain, clean and organize. A house full of furniture that was once the home of a family of five, but now only has two, makes the decision to downsize difficult. Moreover, should something happen to one member of a couple, a home's contents can be a near-insurmountable burden to manage and ultimately sort out. A new ritual of retirement may be the adoption of new retirement minimalism — eliminating items that are in the house because ... well because they have always been there. Even if you don't want to downsize to another home, consider what you can downsize while staying in the home you are in.

Family stuff used to include furniture, glassware, tableware and a long list of family artifacts such as great grandfather Joe's steamer trunk. Lifestyles have changed and keeping and handing down family “things” has become less important. Just consider the fact that the children of the baby boomers — the millennials — aren't following the same life course timetable or preferences of previous generations. They are marrying later in life. Choosing to have fewer or no children. Moreover, the homes they are choosing, many in urban areas, are smaller. Consequently, mom's dining room set doesn't have a place to go and, even if your children have a need for a crib, chances are the one in your attic it is out of style or painted with something that has been, or will be determined to be hazardous.

Family stuff today is about memories that can neither be bought nor replaced. Photos across the generations that are annotated identify who is in the photo and their relationship to children and grandchildren. Family videos that have been copied to the most current medium — no your VHS player isn't worth keeping. Even your own audio stories are recorded to memorialize family history. All of these items can be safely kept in the cloud, occupy little space, accessed by everyone while preserving generations of memories.

Legal stuff includes important documents that you and your family need access to for managing legal, financial and health matters that will become more critical as you age. The list can be long but includes legal and financial records for real estate, wills, health proxies, medical orders and desired intentions, insurance policies, inventories and the assessed value of the insured property, investment records, bank account locations, etc. These documents, along with an up-to-date list of contacts for attorneys, financial advisers, accountants, physicians should be organized, discussed with selected family and friends, and copies maintained in the home as well as with the appropriate professional, e.g., a lawyer that assisted with will writing.

Like spring itself, life after work is an opportunity to start new. Retirement spring-cleaning through all that stuff makes considering alternative housing options possible, simplifies life in older age, and can be an invaluable gift to loved ones.

Warning: May contain offensive language.

Check out his listing on the Regina Directory in the REGINA FINANCIAL SERVICES category.

Some of the services that Worby Wealth Management can help you with:

TRUSTED REGINA FINANCIAL ADVISOR Chris Worby from Worby Wealth Management helps you live your dream!

Chris Worby a Trusted Regina Financial Expert talks about Using a Safety Net:

9. Jun 2014 Trusted Regina Regina Financial Services, TRUSTED TIPS

Finding the shortest and safest route to any of your dreams requires planning and only with a carefully thought out financial plan can you be sure to make the most of your resources and to protect against risks along the way. At Worby Wealth Management, Chris will do his best to help you achieve those dreams with a plan that is tailored to your specific needs and based on your individual situation.
Let Trusted Regina Financial Adisir Chris Worby of Worby Wealth Management help you live your dream!

Using a Safety Net:

Worby Wealth Management a Trusted Regina Financial Consultant talks about your Emergency Fund.

Say in the same month you have your water heater go, your car needs $2500 worth of work and you have to take an emergency trip to see an ailing relative. Where is that money going to come from? Many people know we should save a few months’ worth of expenses for the ‘just in case’ times but very few people know how to.

• How much money should be in an emergency fund?

• How to build one

• How to use it for annual ‘fun’ items I’ve heard it said that you should have 3 to 6 months’ worth of expenses handy on a ‘just in case’ basis.

I generally think a dollar amount is a better idea. Think of how much makes sense for you but a good guideline is somewhere in the $10,000 to $15,000 range – that is enough money to deal with most household’s finances for a couple of months in the event of job loss or such but still allows for funds to go towards longer terms goals like retirement.

Building one can be difficult but really, the best way is to set up a high interest rate account separate from your regular chequing account and send money there from every paycheque. Now that you know what your goal amount is, you can target that and, if you want to go from $0 to $10,000 over the course of 4 years, it’s going to be $2500/yr or about $100/bi-weekly. It may take some time to build this up so I often recommend using tax returns or some other once a year source of funds like bonuses to get this done more quickly.

Finally, I get asked how to budget for an annual trip or some such pretty regularly – this fund can help. Say it’s established and you are ticking along just fine at around $12,000 and you have decided this is good for your household. Once that fund gets above that amount, you have spending money! Say you want to take the family to Mexico during the winter every now and then, whenever you have $17,000 (if it costs $5000), you are free to go. Emergency funds, they are helpful and very few people have them. Give me a call or email and we can figure out how to get one up and running for you.

Chris Worby is a Trusted Regina financial advisor and Wealth Management consultant servicing local Regina households and businesses since 2001.

Some of the services that Worby Wealth Management can help you with:

TRUSTED REGINA FINANCIAL ADVISOR Chris Worby from Worby Wealth Management helps you live your dream!

Chris Worby a Trusted Regina Financial Expert from Worby Wealth Management talks about Being Happy with your Money

11. May 2014 Trusted Regina Regina Financial Services, TRUSTED TIPS

Finding the shortest and safest route to any of your dreams requires planning and only with a carefully thought out financial plan can you be sure to make the most of your resources and to protect against risks along the way. At Worby Wealth Management, Chris will do his best to help you achieve those dreams with a plan that is tailored to your specific needs and based on your individual situation.
Let Trusted Regina Financial Adisir Chris Worby of Worby Wealth Management help you live your dream!

Get Happy with your Money!

I talk with a lot of people about their finances – a lot – and if there’s anything I have learned it is that people are not happy with their money. They feel guilty about their spending and savings habits, feel they need to justify purchases and always end the month without.

Mike Rowe, host of ‘Dirty Jobs’ answered this to someone who was having a hard time finding a job they were ‘happy’ with:

Happiness doesn’t come from a job. It comes from knowing what you truly value, and behaving in a way that’s consistent with those beliefs.

Every household, no matter what stage of life – married, single, divorced, retired, etc – can benefit from considering their values as it relates to their finances, investing, goal setting, etc. Once the values have been established, the decisions become easy.

Let’s talk about these values for a few minutes. First, let’s talk about spending. If a household sat down and said, “We value being debt-free,” a number of decisions get really easy. “Should we buy a brand new car that will take us 8 years to pay off?” “Should we buy a brand new house with an accompanying $350,000 mortgage?” “Should we apply this work bonus to our mortgage using a pre-payment option?” Easy questions to answer once the household value is identified.

How about investing? “I value long term growth over safety and low volatility,” is a different statement from, “I value security in my investments.” Each of these investment statements means that many strategies are immediately eliminated and need never be considered again – how’s that for simplifying the decision-making process!

One of the issues here is that some values are ‘better’ than others – or so we think. There is no inherent benefit to valuing security overgrowth or vice versa. The important part is to follow your values so that your investment experience matches your values.