Dave Life Adventures

Upon my departure from Istanbul, I made my way through Abu Dhabi and Kuala Lumpur to my next destination - Penang, Malaysia.  Within moments of my arrival to Malaysia, I had a new SIM card, pocket full of Malaysian cash and was ready for adventures! The first of which was my very first UBER ride. Yes I realize I am one of the few people to never have used this service before but man was it sweet. As a traveller I am always nervous in a new city, there are way too many stories of getting ripped off by cabbies at the airport. UBER let me watch the entire drive towards my destination with their real time map, talk about piece of mind. Add in the fact that it was about $10 for a 45 minute drive across the city and we will call that a win.  Touring around on the back of Dave's bike, snapping pics as I went Post UBER experience I arrived at my friends Dave, Tasha and family's condo which was big, beautiful and way less to rent than mine back home, these expat guys are d...

Well friends and fam, I am three days into my Greek adventure and down with a chest cold/jet lag. I am by no means incapacitated but having a good number of staff today, my scheduler took pity on this poor soul and gave a day of rest. Hopefully this bonus of sleep will do my body good enough that I can hit the ground running again tomorrow. I am not a fan of running on low. How's Camp? I have loved my first experiences here though at times they can be intense. You learn quick and Euro Relief is staffed by an incredible army of voluteers, many of them are young and few fairly inexperienced but you would never guess it for a moment when you are on the ground. Countless times I have asked the question to the "veteran" staff, "how long have you been here?" only to be shocked by the answer... "Oh about 2 weeks" WOW Seriously! Anyone who quips a negative about todays generation of young people needs to come check these kids out. Seriously, I am so ...

Hello Friends and Family!!! Most of you are aware by now that I have a love of adventure and a desire to change the world! I am horrible however at documenting the crazy adventures I get myself into and so I have resurrected my old blog as a means to journal my various musings and process all the experiences that I am so blessed to have. It also gives me a chance to share these thoughts and stories with the world. So stay tuned and subscribe to email list because tomorrow morning my latest adventure begins. 10am my flight takes off overseas to work at a refugee camp in Greece for the next month, followed by another month of making my way home with stops in Istanbul, Penang, and Bangkok along the way! Please keep me in your thoughts and prayers as I go. I know God has a plan for this and I cannot wait to see how it all plays out. Till next time D

May 2, 2012 the moment I got frustrated enough with carrying a huge debt load that I made a critical decision.... ITS TIME TO SELL! My taxes came due ,you see, and while I had done so well to manage and plan ahead and not take on new debt, somehow I over looked/chose not to see the freight train of a bill I was about to receive. Faced with losing all the gains in my debt fight thus far it was time to do something drastic. It was time to sell my home. I tried not to. I really didn't want to. I liked my little pad and have spent the past 6 years that I owned it refinishing it completely to be exactly as I liked it and it was finally to a point that it felt finished. And so I avoided it, tried to refinance and get rid of my consumer debt and tax bill by sliding it into my mortgage. DIDNT WORK. Turns out there's a rule against using your house to pay your taxes. GRRRR! It was possible to work around it but I just didn't have any peace about it and so I listed my place. I ...

The Finite Reality of Life - this was riginally posted to a friends blog but when she closed hers down I figured I would share it here Life is limited. We only have 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week. No matter what you do you can’t add or subtract from that time. We all get the same amount. Each moment is valuable because of the simple fact that each breath we take is one closer to our last. My intent is not to be morbid but rather to inspire those around me to live each day to its fullest. Think for a moment how much of your life is spent in negative thoughts and situations. For me the largest stress in my life is my debt load. I have expended countless hours figuring out how to juggle everything I owe and get all my payments paid on time. That is until I got fed up with it all and made a conscious decision to change my life. Those of you have followed my blog you will know that I am devoted to getting out of debt and I write this I am nearing the end of that journey. ...

So it's been a while since I updated on my journey to financial freedom so I figured I would take a moment and catch you up to speed. I have made some fairly heavy decisions so here is an update on what my thoughts have been. In January, I made one of the biggest decisions I have had to face since beginning this journey. After a slow Decemeber, (typical in real estate) I faced the sincere reality of having no money and nothing coming in with bills due NOW! Not a wonderful place to be in. My choices: go backward into debt to survive or cash in my investments. One of the few places of diligence in my financial life over the past years was saving 10% and investing for the future so this was not an option I particularly relished. Add the fact that pretty much all of my investments were below what I paid was not increasing my attraction to this option. Capital losses only ever look good on a tax return.  But in the end I made the choice no going backward, I am committed to getting out...

Ok so for a while now a friend of mine has been working as a distributor for a company called  Zija .  Zija sells health products derived from a tree called the  moringa  grown in countries such as India and Africa and is supposedly one the most useful trees in the world. Now I do realize that it seems that everyone is promoting some nutritional supplement and personally I fully admit that I am skeptical. What I must admit though is my distributor friend looks and apparently feels great, meanwhile over the past year or so I continually feel worse and worse.  Im tired, gaining weight, my excema(skin issue) seems to be worse and in general just been feeling blah and so I figure, what have I got to lose, I'll give it a shot. So I called up Candice and ordered a months worth of their SmartMix and decided hey why not blog about my experience while I am at it. So here goes: Day 1 - My Zija SmartMix came yesterday which really wasn't bad for turn around time, my...

I believe that too often Regina gets a bad rap. So often it is criticized for its appearance. BUt anyone who has looked out over the city from Douglas Park Hill. This is my favourite spot of the entire city. From the top of the hill you can basically look out over the entire city. For a time I got up everyday and went to the top of it and pray. Prayers for our city, for our people, for our University, for our arts, and our sciences, for our government and for our businesses because representations of each can seen from here.

The holiday season has come to a close and with all the "Christmas cheer" floating around I am sure a few of you woke up a morning or two a little under the weather. Unfortunately for you there's not a lot of advice from me in that area. What I am here to chat about is the inevitable evil January Credit Card hangover! Christmas spending pushes most of us beyond our means and then with a swipe we cripple our selves with credit card debt. I read an article earlier in the season which read that something like 1/2 of people surveyed hadn't fully paid off their last years Christmas purchases by this year. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that adding new debt to this old debt is creating an incredibly dangerous cycle. SO STOP IT! BREAK FREE! This year do one simple thing to help release yourself from this stress and follow this simple steps: 1. Add up what you spent this year 2. Divide that number by 26 (assuming you get paid every 2 weeks) 3. Eve...

Ok, so the one thing that I am discovering about blogging is that it brings a new level of accountability into my life. It is working great for me in the debt realm so I am taking this opportunity to apply it to the life realm. New years is a time where everyone talks about resolutions. Resolutions though are often quickly forgotten, in fact in my 30ish years on earth only once have kept a New Years reso. (2006 I quit smoking and haven't had a puff since) I assume I am not alone in my numerous resolution failures and so this year I propose we do something different. Let's not just be resolute but let us set goals, real goals, S.M.A.R.T . goals. The SMART acronym is borrowed from my business back ground and stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. And so here are my goals for 2012: Physical - 160 lbs - ok so I realize I am not what most would consider fat but as I near closer and closer to the 180 mark I realize that I need to pay closer attentio...

Ok so I was torn on wether to post this, but in the end I decided to because I want to be straight up on the process of getting out of debt and that includes the frustrations and growing pains as I go along. Hopefully you can take something out of my whining :-P In the short couple of months that I have been focused on getting out of debt I have got to say this is one of the TOUGHEST things I have ever done. Never in my life have I lived on this tight of a budget, somedays there is a place in side of me absolutely screaming "THIS IS KILLING ME!!!" Which I suppose, I realize as I write this is the entire point. I am trying to get rid of the part of me that values feeling rich over true financial stability.  I am however somewhat shocked at how deeply entrenched this consumption addiction runs though. I walked into Costco the other day because I needed to pick up a  small gift for a Christmas party and walked out with the inexpensive gift I had planned but also the Lord o...

The Occupy movements around the world have without question gained peoples attention. Seems like everyone has an opinion and you can't get through 10 minutes of a newscast without something being mentioned. This virtual obsession on the topic has me absolutely intrigued with the source of the media madness. Personally I find myself an outside observer to the whole affair, as a Realtor and accountant my professional background and education would set me up as sympathizer of the 1% but as a Christian who has a deep conviction of Christ's views on social justice my heart is greatly concerned with many of the issues being called on by the 99.  As an outsider, one could easily over simplify the situation and say its all about Evil Corporate America vs A Whiny Bunch of Hippies. As I ponder it more and more though, I realize that the facts simply aren't that simple (they never are). As you look deeper into the situation you begin to see a commentary on our culture both good and ba...

Howdy all! I was sent an email this morning about RRSP's so that sparked me to share some info with you all that I wrote a while ago but that I haven't posted to this blog and figured it may be useful to some of you out there.  The Basics of RRSPs What is an RRSP? An RRSP is the common name a Registered Retirement Savings Plan, a program designed by the Canadian government to promote personal savings for retirement.  How does an RRSP work?  The basis of an RRSP is that any money that you contribute to the RRSP is not included in your taxes until it is taken out. So basically if my income is $35,000 a year but I contribute $5,000 to RRSPs when I file my taxes the government only recognizes $30,000 of what I made as taxable income. The remaining $5,000 will be taxed when I withdraw it from the plan years down the road.  Further than that RRSPs also grow tax free which means any money you earn (interest, dividends) on the m...

Part of waking up to the realization that my past spending habits were leading me down a quick road to destitution has done a lot for my attitude towards money. Further, it has caused me to take a long hard look at how I got in this position. I have never lacked a work ethic in fact I don't remember many points in my life when I didn't have a job, since I was old enough to push a lawnmower I have nearly always been gainfully employed. This work ethic combined with a business degree, professional designation, entrepreneurial attitude and fabulous people skills has made income generation easy for the most part for me, my problem is and always has been keeping any of it. And this sparked a question... What if...  What if I could go back in time and instead of wasting money on momentary pleasures that got me no where I would have learned early to be a saver.  And so I did some calculations for the kiddies, courtesy of the savings calculator I found at  www.daveramsey.com ...

If it ain't broke don't fix it! ...but what if you aren't aware that it's broke.  They say knowledge is power, and I would agree 100% in my bible God warns in Hosea 4: 6 " My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge..." I think this is one of the biggest problems we face in our financial lives. Too many people are intimidated by finances so they just try and ignore them. The overwhelming amount of get rich quick strategy's and underwhelming amount of solid stewardship training that exist creates a intellectual vacuum and so people simply run a budget of, if there is money in the account spend it and if not use the credit card. I realize that's an over simplification but it unfortunately not far off. And that right there is my biggest motivation in life right now, empower people with financial knowledge so that they dont get their financial education from the school of hard-knocks. I personally have made enough mistakes and learned enough lesson...

Hello, my name is David Whitrow and I’m a son, brother, Realtor, CMA, proud Canadian, Christian, rider fan, social conservative, hockey player and SLAVE! …say what… Slave? You heard me SLAVE, S-L-A-V-E, SLAAAAAVE How so you ask, well the Solomon put it best in the book of Proverbs: “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.” Proverbs 22:7 You see, slavery, as we commonly understand it, was abolished through out the entire British Empire in 1834 under the Bristish Parliament's Slavery Abolition Act effectively ending legal slavery in Canada at least until the 1920’s when a little thing called the credit card was invented. Mmmmm credit cards… I have had a love hate relationship with them since I first walked down that university corridor and some dude offered me a free T-shirt for filling out a silly little form, a few weeks later a little piece of plastic showed up at my door. To be honest, I tossed it aside and never reall...

From Capitalism to Communism I am fast realizing that there is no specific economic ideology which will be completely sustainable into eternity, the root cause of which simply is human nature. Take Communism at its purest is not a bad idea, everyone contributes, everyone shares equally, all are provided for, no one is hungry, everyone has a role and we live happily ever after... a perfect world, that is until I want a nicer car than what you have, and you want a bigger house than I have, the covetous human nature kills the potential social equality. Guys like Stalin live in castles while the commoners freeze in the streets. Capitalism is based on growth, as long as everyone is buying and everyone is selling the economy continues and as long as there are new buyers and new sellers it grows, the major fault that I see though is that we as a planet are finite, there is only so much of our resources to go around. Eventually the oil, fresh water, arable land etc runs out and then w...