Dave Life Adventures

So I started this post just as I took off from Greece. I have now arrived in Istanbul, Turkey spent a looooong night in the airport waiting for delayed friends and a groggy day in the city experiencing it from the point of view of Canadians living there to learn language and culture. Today I’ll be playing the tourist so watch good ole insta for my pics (#davelife). It’s already proven to be a beautiful city with incredible people, I can not wait to dive deeper. Istanbul, Turkey I started this journey a month ago relatively unsure that I was making a correct decision but excited for the adventure.   On the outside I maintained confidence and verbally rationalized my decision with ease, on the inside I was far less secure. I can without reservation now state that it was the correct decision. My time on Lesvos was some of the most heart wrenching, exhausting, awesomeness that I have ever experienced. The opportunity to work along side the team at EuroRelief is one tha...

I am finally taking a second to write and I cannot believe that I only have 4 shifts left! 😩  That seems so unbelievably crazy to me. Its been a full few weeks and gotten to the point where in many ways I feel like this place is a part of me. The work is exhausting both physically and emotionally but the people and the community that comes with it are equally beautiful and fulfilling.  Mytilene, Lesvos, Greece In most of my travels it's the dichotomy of the situations I get myself into that often impact me the most and Greece has been no exception. Here we have this beautiful country with thrilling landscapes around every corner and in the middle of it all is the Moria Refugee Camp, a military base and very prisonesque, which now houses 2,000ish men from around the world as they anxiously await their decision on asylum, a place many were told would be a few day stop on their journey but has become their home for months, and a place where hope gradually and continuall...

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 its been far too long since I have posted, and for that I apologize, I promised to bring you all along on my journey to financial freedom and I kind of went off on my own for a bit there. I will catch you up soon on that adventure (a lot has happened) but for this post I just want to share what God has been doing in my heart in this time. You see, I had been lacking in the motivation/inspiration department for the past month or so but through that desert time came an awesome revelation. I NEED Christ in my life! This is a common statement of Christians but unfortunately it can sometimes become just words. I would never have said that I didn't need Christ but actions speak a lot louder than words and my actions were screaming unbelief. Since early in the new year I must admit that I was being lax in my walk with God. Its not that I cognitively loved Jesus any less, I simply went through a period where I just didn't care, and out of that ambivalence I lost my dependence on C...

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 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...

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...