Dave Life Adventures

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...

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 ...

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...