Lately it seems like more and more people are turning to the internet to obtain their financial advice, and the growth in the number of personal finance blogs can certainly attest to that.

Most personal finance blogs have defined their own niche, from sharing different ways to save money, or learning how to invest your money. Some bloggers dig a bit deeper and explore more specific topics like retirement planning, dividend investing, or real-estate.

Standing Out From The Crowd

To stand out from the crowded space that is becoming the personal finance blogosphere, many bloggers try and avoid basic topics that have already been covered to death on other blogs. They look for new ideas to share that are both thought-provoking and controversial to help get them noticed.

There’s nothing wrong with presenting contrarian views, it wouldn’t be much fun if we all just agreed on everything without debate. But the problem with avoiding widely covered topics is that you’re ignoring 90% of the pillars that make up personal finance. Good financial advice starts with the basics of not spending more than you earn, having some short term and long term financial goals, and then saving a portion of your income to help you achieve these goals.

Yet we often believe as personal finance bloggers that most of our readers already understand the basics so we feel we need to give them something more. I can see why they feel that way, since most new blogs are typically only read by other bloggers until they build a following of other readers. It’s understandable to want to show other bloggers that they’re not just rehashing standard personal finance advice that can be found on every other blog.
Getting Back To Basics

As I said earlier, more people are looking online for financial ideas and advice. They are looking for answers to solve a specific problem. If you have written helpful articles that solves their problem they will likely find your article in their search engine results. If they enjoy your unique point of view, they might stick around and become a regular reader. People probably aren’t searching for what kind of superhero costume you think your favourite blogger should wear, or why your investment account is like molten lava.

True, there might be thousands of articles written about how to save on auto insurance or why you should cut television out of your life. But none of them were written by you with your own unique interpretation of the topic.

Let’s face it, articles around the internet that get the most engagement from readers are about basic personal finance topics that people are still divided on. Joint or separate finances for couples, how much should you have in your emergency fund, and how to save on your grocery budget will always be more popular than how to invest in Chinese paper companies.

I guarantee that you have an opinion about the best way to approach even the most basic personal finance topic. If you want to be controversial and stand out, take one of those basic topics and share your own opinion on how to do it better, or explain why it’s a waste of time.

Be unique, but don’t ignore the basics of personal finance. We’re all looking for ways to improve our finances, and some of the best ideas are often the simplest ones that we overlook.

Sometimes things cost more than you expected. Sometimes, you know that things are going to cost more, you’re just not sure where and how it is going to hit you. We moved over this last weekend, and we ran across a couple of unexpected moving expenses. Thankfully, they were only unexpected in the sense that I wasn’t sure where, exactly, the extra cost would come from, but I had budgeted a couple hundred dollars extra for the many costs of moving “just in case”. Well, here is where we got dinged this time around.
The Rental Truck

The last time that I moved, I went with a uHaul truck. I was quite happy with their service at this particular branch, so I wasn’t too afraid to try it again. Classic uHaul, however, demands that we received a phone call the night before our scheduled pickup, telling us that the truck that we had reserved, the truck that we had called to confirm would be there, had just been sent out on a one-way trip and would, therefore, not be available come the following day. Thanks, uHaul. Well, now our options were a smaller truck, or a significantly larger truck. We went with the larger one, fearing that the smaller one would not be an adequate size. So instead of a 20′ truck, we now had a 26′ truck.

However, larger trucks cost more in a couple of different areas when it comes to uHaul. First, and foremost, they take more gas to move. Seeing as you have to return the gas to its previous level when you return a uHaul truck, this meant we would be spending more on gas for the truck rental. Okay, no big deal. What was a big deal, however, was that we are moving to Vancouver Island, which necessitates a trip on the Ferry. The ferry that charges for every foot past 20′ to get onto the ferry. Knowing this, we immediately made it clear to the uHaul rep that we would be out of pocket some extra money for the move, and asked for some sort of refund or reimbursement for the cost. So we got $60 off the cost of the rental, which we figured would cover the extra cost on the ferry. It did not.
The Ferry

So uHaul advertises their trucks in terms of length. You have everything from a 10′ cargo truck to a 26′ cargo truck. What is not immediately apparent, however, is that the length measurement is actually the length of the cargo space, not the entire truck. So when we arrived at the ferry, the kind attendant measured our truck to determine our ferry cost, and measured it at 33′. Not 26′, 33′. Yikes. So instead of an expected ~ $120 cost for the ferry, we were suddenly looking at a $225 bill – and we needed to bring the truck back the other way as well.

Now, BC Ferries also has a policy where vehicles that are registered as more than 5500kg area are automatically classified as “commercial” trucks. Therefore they pay a commercial rate, which is part of the reason why our ferry cost was so much more than expected. Little did we know that taking a “slightly” larger truck would result in so much extra cost! uHaul wasn’t really doing us a favour by offering us a larger truck, but seeing as taking a smaller one wasn’t an option, we were suddenly looking at much higher moving costs.

On the return trip, however, we were only charged as an oversized vehicle, meaning that our cost was closer to $160. So I phoned uHaul to see if our truck was, in fact, over the 5500kg limit. I was told that the empty weight of the 26′ truck was 11,570lbs, which is slightly less than the 5500kg cutoff. A few phone calls to BC Ferries later, and now I am waiting for a phone call from their Revenue Department to see if we can get part of the Commercial rate refunded to us, as we were misclassified and therefore charged an inappropriate amount.
The Safety

We came up to a couple of situations where we had to make a decision between saving some money and the potential loss of all our goods. The first was the night after we got the truck. We had loaded it, but parked it, intending to hop on the first ferry the next morning. The moving truck, however, did not have a lock for the rear door, meaning that anyone could just walk up to it and take things out. Now, we lived in a terrific neighbourhood and I highly doubt that anybody would have gone into the truck. Even if someone had, the majority of our expensive goods were pilled near the back, so they would have had a heck of a time getting something out of the truck in a short amount of time that was worth any money. Regardless, it is disconcerting to think that someone can rifle through your things while you sleep. Therefore, I was sent to purchase a padlock for the truck. It only cost $15, and I probably could have gotten a cheaper one, but I wanted to make sure I got a decent one that would work with the lock handle on the truck.

Later on, once we had moved our things into a storage space, we had the option of purchasing insurance for our goods. Again, it is highly unlikely anyone would be able to break into our locker, or that a fire would start, or that a water pipe would burst. However, those things could happen, and if they do, we would have wished we purchased insurance. So we did. It was another $50 or so, for the duration that our things will be there, and we certainly didn’t have to purchase it. But we decided to eat the cost of the insurance just so that we would have peace of mind about our property while we are unable to take care of it.

How have your moves gone? Have you had many unexpected moving expenses?

We’re all here for one reason- we want to accumulate assets and end up becoming wealthy. Ultimately, there’s only one way to build wealth, and that’s spending less than you earn. If you earn a lot, the spending part of the equation isn’t so important, since your higher wage will take care of it. If your salary is average or less suddenly becoming wealthy has become a whole lot harder. You have to scrimp and save, using various frugal tactics to stretch the value of your meagre wage. But that doesn’t mean you can’t start thinking like a wealthy person.

Obviously wealth means different things to different people. For me, the goal has always been a one million dollar net worth with the caveat of being debt free. Your view of wealth may be less aggressive or maybe more, there’s really no perfect answer. It’s one of those personal finance decisions that’s ultimately personal. I’m not here to tell you what that goal should be.

What I am here to tell you is that some of you are doing this whole wealth gaining thing all wrong. And by doing so, you’re limiting your future potential. You’re unintentionally making it harder to become wealthy. And since it’s hard to gain wealth in the first place, shooting yourself in the foot is practically fatal, at least when it comes to getting rich.
Change Your Mindset

Let me tell you a story. We all like stories, right?

Regular readers of my blog know that I rent out my basement. When I bought my house a few years ago, I specifically sought out a property that already had a basement suite built in. Once I bought the place, all it needed was a few hundred dollars in repairs before the basement was ready to go.

For the last 3 years, I’ve rented out the basement every month. I’ve had great tenants (with one exception) who were quiet, respectful and took great care of the place. Most months all I do is sit around and wait for the rent to come in. Every month I make an extra $650 for doing very little work. There is sacrifice there, but it’s well worth the profit.

I understand that my particular example may not be appropriate for you. The point of the story is that, by making one decision, I was able to cut my housing costs more than in half. I was able to accelerate my mortgage payments significantly because I suddenly have $7800 in extra income.

Keep on the lookout for unconventional ways to accumulate wealth. And if they make you uncomfortable? Then maybe you’re not serious about building wealth.
Frugality Has Its Limits

Don’t take that heading the wrong way. I don’t want you to abandon frugality completely. You just need to realize it has limits.

I’m the first to admit my lifestyle could be cut back. I don’t go out for meals nearly as often as I used to, but I still go several times a week. I have an iPhone and a Playstation 3. My house has central air, even though Canada is only warm for approximately 20 minutes during the summer. I’m hardly an example of a hardcore frugal guy. And I don’t care.

Cutting excess can only go so far. You can only reduce your heating bill or your gas consumption so much. I’m not saying you should ignore frugality- far from it. Just realize that cutting excess from your life has a limit, but earning more doesn’t.

There are thousands of people who have used good long term habits to build up a significant nest egg. Most of those people are frugal. But they also have a life. You can’t cut your way to wealth. Cutting excess sure does help, but it’s only a part of the battle.
Work Harder

If you’re serious about wealth then you gotta get off your butt, start thinking like a wealthy person and get at the plan.

Does work offer overtime? Take it. Do you get a lot of vacation? Work during your time off. Do whatever it takes to earn more money. Are you serious about getting rich or not?

You can have one of two responses to this post. It can motivate you or reinforce the reasons why you work so hard. Or, it can make you angry. I can envision the negative thoughts already. It’s not that easy! I don’t have time for extra work! I’m already trying really hard! Which mindset is best for building wealth? Which mindset are you?

There are two ways you can start an internet business from home to make money online (well, for the sake of this post at least); you can either sell something or you can become an infopreneur… maybe you can even do both.
Selling products

This is the obvious one of course, and there are many different ways to go about selling products online. Selling on eBay is a popular option, the traffic is already ready and waiting to purchase if you can offer the right products – the key to making money on eBay is price, if you know where to find in demand products at steep discounts, you can make a great profit.

An alternative to become an eBay discounter is to become a specialist. The internet is a wonderful place to find hard to get products – niche is big business if you know your market. Try to think of something that you know a lot about, think about what interests you and what products you like to buy.

Some fantastic businesses have been started based around what many people would consider obscure markets, but if you know your market the path less trodden is often the route to riches… or at least a decent few bucks.Becoming an infopreneur

In the world we live in nowadays, people have information overload. The value of attention is at a premium. Becoming an infopreneur means leverage your personal knowledge and experiences (or hiring someone else’s) to attract the attention, and loyalty of the public.

It really is true that if you can build the traffic, making money is almost trivial… But first you have to figure out how to provide the value that will bring that traffic. Build traffic first and you can make your money however you like: Adsense, eBay affiliate, Amazon… etc.
Putting it all together

The great thing is this: whichever option you choose, you can try the other option too. The two models can work synergisticly together, by attracting traffic with great products and with great content, building communities and managing customer relationships…

So if you start out with a blog for instance, with a solid base of traffic and loyal readers who trust you and want to hear what you have to say, why not set up shop? You probably know your audience pretty well by this point, so you are already perfectly qualified to offer them the right niche products.

Going the other way, how about starting a niche eBay business… you’ll soon get to know your products pretty well, and you’ll learn all of the questions that people have about them. This is the perfect launch pad for an information rich website. You are already building customers, so what better way to build relationships than by offering your customers great advice and helpful content?
What’s the best choice?

So that’s what it all comes down to then. You make money by finding the right products and taking them to where the traffic is, or you can build your own traffic and monetize it later. So try to figure out what you can do best: Find products and serve customers, or build traffic and grow a community, then go make some money.

Starting a part-time home business can be a great way to supplement your regular income and provide you with some tax opportunities.

A home business could be almost anything that gives you an expectation of earning income. Most ideas would fall under either selling a product or service. Your business could be fixing computers or selling items on eBay. Even a blog counts as a home business as the advertisements provide income.

The simplest way to register as a business is to start a sole proprietorship. In Alberta, if you are operating under your own name, you don’t need to register your business name. If you want to operate under a trade name, you’ll need to have the name approved and registered with the Corporate Registry. Other provinces may have different rules regarding registering a business name. Please check your provincial government’s website to verify what you need to do.

Now that I’ve explained a bit about setting up a home business, over the next three days I will be showing you some of the advantages of a home business from a tax perspective.

From a legal perspective, a proper estate plan is accomplished by drafting three essential documents: a Will, an Enduring Power of Attorney, and a Personal Directive. All other estate planning decisions, such as beneficiary designations and how you own certain assets, must work in concert with these three legal documents.

Will

The most important of your estate planning documents is your Will. A Will says what happens with all your worldly goods after your death. A Will may include trusts for your loved ones. A Will is used to appoint guardians for your minor children. Be careful about the consequences of dying without a will.

In its most basic form, a Will is a document that defines four important groups of people in your estate plan.
Beneficiaries. Not only does the Will say who will get your assets after your death, but also specifically which assets each beneficiary will get and how and when your beneficiaries should get those assets.
Executor. The Will must appoint someone who has the responsibility to settle your estate. Choosing the right executor is not as easy a task as you might think. This person has a lot of responsibility and should be someone who can handle a difficult task. Your executor should be someone who has some financial experience. Ultimately, your executor should be someone you trust.
Trustee. If you are planning to have any trusts set up in your Will, then you will need to appoint a trustee to manage the trusts.
Guardians. If you have minor children, it is crucial that you appoint guardians for those children. This, too, is a big responsibility. Obviously, you should ask permission before you appoint someone as a guardian in your Will.

You can write your own will or use a will kit but be careful as a Will must be written and signed according to very specific rules that are different in every province. While this may seem insignificant, there are many stories about people who did not follow these rules and thereby caused problems in the estate settlement process.
Enduring Power of Attorney

The second formal document in an estate plan is the Enduring Power of Attorney. The Enduring Power of Attorney appoints someone to manage your financial affairs if you are alive but not capable of making financial decisions for yourself. It also sets out that person’s powers. The person you appoint is called your attorney.
Personal Directive

The third document essential to an estate plan is the Personal Directive which appoints someone to make health care decisions for you if you are alive but cannot do so yourself. It may also set out your wishes. The person you appoint is called your agent.
Other Things To Do

Although these documents are crucially important, there are other strategies for estate planning outside these formal documents. Other strategies include owning things jointly with other people or naming direct beneficiaries on certain assets like RRSPs, RRIFs and life insurance policies. It may also mean giving away assets during your lifetime or creating trusts before you die.

As part of the estate planning process, start with these three documents and the rest of your plan will follow accordingly.

I wrote previously about how accelerated bi-weekly mortgage payments can pay your mortgage off sooner.

In that post I used this example, if you have a $200,000 mortgage, amortized for 25 years @ 5%, and bi-weekly accelerated payments, you would pay $124,095 in interest and will have the mortgage paid off in 22 years. The bi-weekly payment would be $582.

While this step saved almost $25,000 in interest, another step could be to increase your payment amount. Many banks will allow you to pay up to twice the amount of your set mortgage payment.

By increasing your bi-weekly payment to an even $700, you would pay $88,346 in interest and pay your mortgage off in 16 years. This saves you almost $36,000 more in interest and reduced the life of the mortgage by 6 more years.

With the bi-weekly payment and increasing the amount, the interest was reduced by over $60,000 and the mortgage was paid off 9 years early over a regular monthly payment!

If you don’t think you have the available money to increase your payment that much, even rounding up to $600, an $18 increase in this example, would save almost $7,500 over the set bi-weekly payments and pay the mortgage off in 21 years.

The simplest way to free up money to increase your bi-weekly payment might be to fill out a T1213 or a TD1 and reduce the amount you pay in taxes instead of waiting for your tax refund.

With yesterday’s announcement changing the maximum mortgage length from 35 to 30 years, you might be asking how much mortgage can I afford? As The Globe and Mail pointed out, if someone bought a home at the average Canadian resale price of $344,551 at a 4% interest rate and a 5% down payment, a 35-year mortgage would have monthly payments of $1,441. However, the new maximum amortization period of 30 years increases the monthly payment by 8%, which would now be $1,555 a month.So while the 5 year difference in the maximum amortization length shouldn’t be a deal breaker, it will force people to pay off their house sooner. Some fringe buyers will be forced out of the market though, since this will increase their debt service ratio and could be the difference between qualifying for the mortgage or not. If your concerned that these changes will effect how much mortgage you can afford, consider these two ideas to increase your down payment and reduce the amount you’ll need to borrow:
Home Buyers Plan

One way to make your home more affordable is through the Home Buyers’ Plan, which allows you to borrow $25,000 from your RRSP to put towards your down payment. Your spouse can also withdraw $25,000 from their RRSP as well. So if you both have saved up enough in your RRSPs, this can be a great way to come up with $50,000 to add to your down payment and reduce your mortgage.
TFSA

Another great way to save up a down payment is to use your TFSA, which now provides $15,000 in contribution room, $30,000 if you have a spouse that’s also saving up towards your new house.

The new mortgage rules that the CMHC announced will certainly make it more difficult for some to set a mortgage, but if you put together a decent down payment with one (or both) of the ideas above, you can qualify for a mortgage and pay it off sooner!

Between September and December of last year, national newspaper The Guardian published the „diary of a debtor“, a series dealing with the theme of bankruptcy in an unusually upfront fashion. Whether or not the anonymous blogger was a real person or whether the series merely provided useful advice on bankruptcy by latching it onto an instructional yet ultimately fictional story, remained intriguingly open to debate. Either way, the six articles painted a rather untypical picture of bankruptcy as a sort relief for those involved and sparked quite a bit of healthy debate. The notion of insolvency as a sheet anchor may certainly have stretched things a little too far. And yet, the „diary“ did point out two important aspects: Bankruptcy can happen to anyone. But when it does become inevitable, fortunately, there are plenty of bankruptcy services to choose from to make the process less cumbersome.

Debunking the myths of bankruptcy

With 15 million adults in the UK sliding into unmanageable debt, there’d better be. If, today, bankruptcy no longer carries the social stigma it used to, then this is simply because too many have already made unpleasant practical experiences in this regard for them to point the finger at others. Traditional clichés about insolvency no longer apply, if they ever did in the first place: if you thought citizens in the North of England were more likely to file for bankruptcy, home owners more susceptible to it than tenants and the old more prone to worry about debt than the young, for example, think again, as all of these assumptions have officially been debunked as myths. No wonder both the government and the private sector have sought to provide bankruptcy services for those in need of help. And so, bankruptcy advice can be gleaned from institutions like the National Debtline or various charities as well as professional, fee-charging debt management companies, who compensate for the costs involved in using their bankruptcy services by working more swiftly and with shorter waiting times.

Alternatives to bankruptcy

There are also various alternatives to bankruptcy. Before filing for insolvency, it is vital to first check, whether or not a DRO, IVA or any other colourful abbreviation may be suitable for you – to many, these options have already proven to be a great way of steering clear of the disadvantages of a bankruptcy. One should never forget that despite its undeniable benefits, a bankruptcy is nonetheless a psychologically stressful and painful experience. After all, once bankruptcy is declared, you no longer have control over your property and could potentially lose everything you own, including your home, your car and dear, personally meaningful possessions. Your credit rating will be affected for a full six years, thereby making it harder for you to obtain loans at reasonable interest rates for a very long time. This is adding to the already high pressure and stress for those facing bankruptcy – no wonder that bankruptcy and ill health are closely connected. Even worse, in many cases, former bankruptees can no longer get something as basic as a regular savings account.

Get advice from a professional bankruptcy service

Clearly then, advice on bankruptcy by a professional bankruptcy service is of seminal importance. One of the best ways of gauging whether a debt management company is a potentially good choice for you is to check whether they have been certified by DEMSA, an organisation founded to foster high ethical and professional standards in the debt advice business. The Debt Advisory Line is one of just a handful of outstanding companies holding this certificate.

There are many people who are feeling overwhelmed by the burden of their high credit load. This can be seen though the increase in consumer bankruptcies over the past year. If you are feeling like you’ll never be able to pay off the debt you’ve accumulated, you might be wondering if you should file for bankruptcy.

In yesterday’s article about dealing with your debt through a consumer proposal, I mentioned how you can reach an agreement with your creditor’s to pay back a portion of your debt within 5 years and they will freeze the interest and forgive the remaining debt. But what if you can’t afford to offer and complete a consumer proposal? This could happen, either due to not having enough available money to make the structured payments or even worse, divorce or job loss.

Using an example similar to yesterday’s but with twice the debt load, say the same person is still only able to pay $500 a month but their debts equal $100,000 instead of $50,000. Before they could offer, and be accepted, to pay $500 a month for 50 months, paying off 50% of the original debt. Since a consumer proposal can only last a maximum of 5 years, the new example with the higher debt could only offer $500 a month for 60 months, or $30,000. While not impossible, it’s unlikely that the majority of creditors would accept receiving only 30% of the money owed to them.

This may leave you with no other option but to discuss filing for bankruptcy with a licensed bankruptcy trustee. If you do claim bankruptcy, the trustee will seize your non-essential possessions to pay back as much to your creditors as possible. While it varies by province, the items you are allowed to keep may include your primary residence, a car, food, clothing, furniture and tools for your job. Also depending on the province, these can all have set dollar limits of what is considered reasonable.

On top of giving up many of your possessions, during your bankruptcy you must report your income and expenses each month and attend credit counseling. Most first-time bankruptcies last for nine months, though it can be longer. Your credit report and credit rating will suffer as well as there will be a bankruptcy note on your file for 6 years after you were discharged.

So why would you want to file for bankruptcy when it involves handing over most of what you own and destroying your credit rating? If you can’t afford any other option, bankruptcy will eliminate all your unsecured debt and can give you a fresh start towards responsibly rebuilding your credit history and keeping your finances under control.