The Importance of Budgeting

Budgeting is important because it helps you ensure all bills are covered and sets limits on your spending, all within the amount of income you bring in. To improve your financial situation, you have to increase your cash flow by spending less than you make.

To budget properly, you need to know where you’re spending your money. This isn’t so easy if you spend mostly cash, though it can be done if you keep a notebook on you or save all receipts.

How to Plan a Budget and Benefit from Rewards

Using a credit card can help you keep track of your spending so that you have a meaningful budget that you can stick to. If you put all your spending on one card, then the statement becomes your monthly spending report. And likely all cards now allow you to login online to review your spending every day. Then, every month, you simply use your paycheque to pay the credit card bill.

But if you’re doing all your spending on a rewards card like the TrueEarnings Card, not only can you track your spending, but you’ll also be earning towards a nice cash back reward at the end of the year. This payment can help fund an annual budget goal like saving into an RRSP or TFSA.

How You Can Use Your Credit Card to Reduce Your Budget

While I’m using my TrueEarnings Card for all my purchases, it will also help me stay within budget since I get up to 2% cash back on gas, 3% on restaurant spending and up to 1% everywhere else, including Costco, where I’m doing most of my spending anyway.

And if you are shopping at Costco quite a bit like I do, reduce your spending budget for the year even more by getting Costco’s Executive Membership and receive another 2% annual rebate on most of your Costco purchases.

A credit card is a tool in your personal finance toolbox. Helping you create a budget and earning rewards are just a couple examples of the benefits when you use it responsibly!

Related Posts:

• Guide to Choosing a Rewards Credit Card
• Reasons to Use Your Credit Card for Christmas Shopping
• Helping Your Budget With The TrueEarnings Card from Costco and American Express

Better Budgeting with a Credit Card originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on November 21, 2011.

Using meal planning to know what you are going to eat for dinner in advance can save you from making impulse visits to your favourite restaurant or fast food chain, as well as those last minute trips to the grocery store when your fridge is bare.

Tips to Get Started

Start by making a dinner list.  I recommend matching the length of your list to your payday cycle.  If you get paid weekly, plan for seven dinners, if it’s bi-weekly then plan for fourteen dinners.  I get paid monthly and plan for thirty nightly meals.  Stick your list on the fridge or another visible area in the kitchen so you remember to take something out to defrost before you leave for work.

Before you head to the grocery store, take stock of what’s already in your fridge, freezer, and pantry.  From there you can use your dinner list to make your shopping list.  I make a list for shopping at Costco that includes meat, dairy, frozen fruit and vegetables, and other staples.  When I get home I make sure to split up the meat into smaller portions for freezing.

Then I make a list for Safeway or Superstore to shop for fresh produce and anything else we need that doesn’t come in mega-packs.  I find the grocery prices at Safeway a bit high so I try and shop there on the 1^st Tuesday of the month to take advantage of customer appreciation day (15% off).

Shopping and Cooking in Bulk

Most people shop for convenience rather than looking for the best price.  Consider the cost per unit when buying your grocery staples.  For example at Costco you can buy a 1.5L bottle of ketchup for $5.99, or you can pay $4.99 for a bottle half the size at another grocery store.

When it comes to cooking, one thing we learned is that if it takes 15 minutes to prepare one meal, it will only take a few more minutes to prepare four meals of the same recipe.  Pack the rest up and toss it in the freezer, and later when you need it, getting dinner ready is as simple as popping it in the oven or microwave when you get home from work.

Think of the money you’ll save by always knowing what you’re having for dinner each night or by having already prepared meals on-hand.  No more last minute fast food trips or ordering take-out.  Even with our small family of three it would cost us at least $40 for dinner at a restaurant.  When you plan your meals and cook at home each dinner can cost less than $10.

Be Flexible With Your Plan

Planning your meals in advance can take some getting used to, but your plan doesn’t have to be written in stone.  Sometimes life gets in the way.  We switch our meals around all the time depending on what the weather is doing if we’re barbequing, if we’re running home late from work, or just to use up perishables before they go bad.

Since we started meal planning a few years ago we have saved around $250 a month.  Quite often we end up with leftovers to use for lunch, which saves us even more money.  Not only that, my wife and I have lost weight, tried and perfected a variety of new recipes, and have actually become pretty decent cooks.  Best of all, we’re eating a lot healthier and enjoy more time with each other.

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Planning Your Meals Saves Time And Money originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on November 8, 2011.

Years ago, before my wife and I got married, we lived down the street from a Tim Horton’s.  Shocking, I know…considering there’s only one Tim Horton’s for every 8,000 people in my city.

Every weekend we would walk over to Tim’s for breakfast; which consisted of a large coffee and two everything bagel’s with cream cheese for me, and a large coffee, muffin and yogourt for my wife.  Total cost – $10.  Sometimes we ate there on Saturday and Sunday.  This was our equivalent to the pack of cigarettes a week habit.

I’m not sure what we did to finally break this habit, but now we eat breakfast at home for about $2 a day, including coffee.  And guess what?  The bagel and coffee are just as tasty at home.  Something as simple as changing our breakfast habits has saved us over $500 a year.

The point is that I used to think it was impossible to save more money or cut back on our expenses, but when I took a closer look at our daily routines and habits, I was able to find big savings just by making small changes in our routine.

Meal Planning

We’ve all come home from a busy day at work without giving a second thought to our dinner plans.  So what do we do?  Stop for take-out on the way home from work, or head out to a restaurant for a quick meal.  Taking a few minutes to create a weekly meal plan helped us break that habit and saved us hundreds of dollars a month.

Budgeting

Most of us find the budgeting process tedious and believe that as long as we pay ourselves first we can do whatever we want with the rest of our paycheque.  The problem with this approach is that you’re more likely to squander money on little things that you don’t even realize have become a habit.  Tracking your expenses for a few months will give you a good sense of your spending habits and then you can develop a budget to keep your expenses in-line.

Spending

Canadians love debit cards, even if we have to pay up to $12.95 a month for the privilege of using them.  After I got my finances under control, out of habit, I still used a debit card for my everyday spending.  Then I discovered rewards credit cards, which worked just like my debit card except I was the one getting paid in the form of cash back or Air Miles rewards.  Just make sure to pay off your bill in full every month and don’t overspend just to earn more points.  I’ve earned more than $500 a year just by using my rewards credit card regularly.

Develop Healthy Routines

We all have our vices, and I’m not saying we need to eliminate the things we enjoy.  But it’s important to understand the difference between healthy routines and bad financial habits.  Small changes in your habits can save you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a year.

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Small Changes Add Up To Big Savings originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on October 4, 2011.

In my workshops to help improve your personal finances, I have always preached that the best idea in the world is the implemented idea.  It is better to have done something and failed than to have done nothing.  We’ve all heard the saying “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

Is financial education the problem?

Many people and organizations have argued that we have a real problem when it comes to financial education and financial literacy.  Although financial education is my business, I’m not convinced that lack of education is the problem.  There is no shortage of information on how to become richer, how to have less debt, how to prepare for retirement, how to invest better or hoe to improve your personal finances.  Information is abundant.  As much as knowledge is important remember that you can have lots of knowledge stored in your head but if you do nothing with that information then what good is it to have the information.

Doing creates results

Reading is good.  Researching is good.  Discussing is good but doing is great because it is what creates results.  Here’s a list of things you can do to improve your personal finances:

1. Figure out your net worth.  This is so simple and yet not enough people know their net worth.  All you have to do is take a piece of paper and on one side write down everything you own and on the other side write down everything you owe.  How can you get ahead financially if you have no idea how much you are worth.  Start with the basics and refine it later.  To learn more details about your net worth, here’s an article with a downloadable spreadsheet to how I track my own net worth – Calculate your net worth

2. Track your expenses.  Knowing how much you spend is a key determinant of financial success.  Too many people are living paycheque to paycheque or even worse spending beyond their means.  How would you know if you have a spending problem or not if you had no idea how much you were spending? Here’s another article I wrote sharing some different ways to track your spending – Know your spending

3. Take control of your investments.  Nobody cares about your money more than you care.  Start doing by simply taking stock of your investments and determine why you own what you do. Here’s an article on how to review your RRSP portfolio if you have not done so in a long time.  If you are working with a financial advisor give him/her a call and book an appointment for a review.  Walk into that meeting with a list of questions because you care about your money.

4. Get a will done.

   Not only should you get your will done but you should also get a power of attorney and a personal directive done as well. In my 20 years in the financial industry I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen people without these key documents and the result is problems, costs, delays and conflicts.

5. Get the right bank account.  A bank account is something we use everyday and in today’s world, not all bank accounts are created equal.  My suggestion is to look into high interest bank account options because they are the types of accounts that work in your favour because they pay interest and charge no monthly service fees.  I am very passionate about getting the right bank account so here’s a few articles on getting the right bank account:

• Have you reviewed your bank account lately?
• Every penny counts in banking.
• Keeping a minimum balance in your bank account

6. Start an automatic savings plan.  For many saving money does not come naturally.  Saving money is one of the four key disciplines to financial success.  Putting away money for the future is so much harder when you don’t automate it. Doing is simply a matter of going to your financial advisor or institution and asking them to start a regular withdrawal from your bank account into a Tax Free Savings account  (TFSA) or Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP).  If your employer has an option to take it off your paycheque, that’s even better.  If your employer is willing to match your contributions that’s the best.  If you need help saving money, here are my principles of saving money.

This list is far from complete. There are so many things you can be doing.  I think this list forms some of the basic skills needed for tour financial health.  If you have done these things then keep doing something else.  There’s always room for improvement.  Doing something is better than nothing.  It’s never to late to start doing something.  I think Nike said it best “Just do it!”

What kinds of things are you doing to improve your personal finances?  What things are you planning to do?

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The Art of Doing Something with Your Money originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on September 27, 2011.

I’ve also written previously of my love for shopping at Costco, where I have an Executive Membership that pays for itself with weekly grocery and gas purchases, as well as everything from tires to wedding rings. However, they don’t accept any credit cards other than American Express.

So I was quite happy when I was asked to try out the TrueEarnings Card from Costco and American Express. The TrueEarnings Card has a few things I like, including up to 1% cash back on everyday purchases. Perhaps the best part (and a must for me) is that there is no annual fee.

Another nice thing that I liked about this card was the included travel accident insurance and a buyer assurance protection plan that doubles a manufacturer’s warranty up to one additional year. You might not appreciate the true value of these perks until you need them; either one could save you a lot of money depending on the situation. These kind of extra features are often found in cards with annual fees, not any of the other no fee cards that I have.

But the best feature of this card is ultimately the cash back rewards. And you don’t need to spend that cheque at Costco either; you can cash is out and take the cash. Because of this, you could use the money for an annual RRSP contribution or to make a lump sum payment on your mortgage. While you don’t want to spend unnecessarily just for the rewards, responsibly using a cash back card like this is a great way to earn extra money on purchases you are already making.

I’ll be sharing some more details about the TrueEarnings Card in the coming months as I get a chance to use it some more!

Related Posts:

• My Thoughts On The TrueEarnings Card from Costco and American Express
• Guide to Choosing a Rewards Credit Card
• Better Budgeting with a Credit Card

Helping Your Budget With The TrueEarnings Card from Costco and American Express originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on September 7, 2011.

Pros

I don’t like to spend a lot of time on my finances. I’m much more of a “set it and forget it” kind of guy when it comes to budgeting, so I have all my bills and savings automated so that I never have to worry about not having enough for the phone bill or not being strong enough to set money aside for the future. Therefore, I absolutely LOVE Mint’s ability to let me hop onto the website, and within seconds the website has accessed my bank accounts and credit cards, gotten updated information from their websites, and compiled it all neatly in front of me. I often will just log into Mint, ensure that nothing looks terribly out of place, and will rest assured that I don’t have any fires to put out.

At the same time, Mint is also great at getting down to the nitty and gritty. Once every two weeks or so, I will go through all the transactions that I’ve made, again, just confirming that transactions went through okay, I wasn’t double charged for anything, and everything is labeled correctly. Every single transaction in or out is listen for me, chronologically, and I can quickly find a bill and sort the transactions by that type to ensure that my latest cable bill, for example, matches with what I have been getting charged in the past.

Best of all, Mint’s powerful budgeting and trends calculations get better with time. At first, I could only look back a month or two, but now that I have been using it for 8 months, I have almost a year’s worth of data to look back upon. I can see exactly how much I am spending on my car, for example, and if I spent more in the summer or in the winter. I can see in which months we spent a lot on groceries, and in which we were eating through our freezer. I can tell in which months we were tired and stressed the most, as those are the months we ate out the most. Seeing all of this incredibly personalized data about myself helps me learn about my own personal spending habits, and helps me address them for the future. Mint teaches me how I have been using my money, and by doing so, teaches me how to use my money better

Cons

Sadly, the cons that I listed on the first Mint review still stand. I still can’t add my Student Loans (seriously Mint?), Mint still mislabels transactions, and Mint still has me adding assets manually, so depreciating assets like vehicles are going to constantly mess up my financial totals that Mint provides to me. I would have to go in and manually change them as the valuation on my vehicle or home changes. I avoid that particular problem by just not adding any additional assets.

Even more sadly, a few more negatives have popped up in the last few months. The first, and foremost, was a weird issue with the system. To be honest, I don’t know exactly what happened, but somehow I started seeing duplicate transactions in my account. I thought, at first, that I had been charged twice at a particular restaurant, but when I noticed that I had multiple charges at a couple of locations I got suspicious. I checked with my credit card’s website, and that did not report the same double charges. Back on Mint, I finally figured out that my credit card had been added twice to my account. At first, I just went through and labelled the duplicates as duplicates, and Mint removed them. That, however, was time consuming. I then tried to figure out how to remove one of the credit cards from the site, but was unable to. When I contacted Mint’s support, I finally figured out that this was an issue that they are aware of, and the “fix” was to go into the settings on one of the credit cards and to mark it as “hidden”. It seems quite odd to me that there is no easier way of removing an account from my Mint’s portfolio, and to this day it is still sitting there, hidden away. Mint is still usable, but I do not know if a bunch of the data that I had marked as duplicate is now completely gone, as I do not know if the transactions that I marked were from the duplicate or the original.

The only other issue that I have is that Mint will randomly stop being able to pull the information from one of my accounts. Currently, my credit card account has not been updated on the site for about a week. Mint keeps asking me to confirm that my account still exists on the credit card’s site (it does), and to confirm my login information (it is correct), yet will constantly time out and be unable to pull the credit card’s data. It has done this before with my online account and my other bank account. Often this problem fixes itself within a few days, but is nonetheless annoying to deal with.

Conclusion

Overall, Mint is a fantastic resource and I highly recommend people check their site out. I, personally, have not had any type of privacy or security concerns, and the benefits that I get from having all my personal financial information in one location, stored historically, is far greater than any fear I have. If you were unimpressed with Mint’s tools, check them out again once they have a few more months of data, you may be surprised at what it can do.

Have you been using Mint? What do you think?

Related Posts:

• Mint.com Canadian Review
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Mint Review, 8 Months Later originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on August 3, 2011.

I’m lazy.

I’m not just a regular amount of lazy either. I’m so lazy I’ve been known to eat meals directly from the pot to avoid dishes later. I once didn’t cut my grass for an entire month, only giving in when a neighbour yelled at me over the fence. I’ve been known to not shave for weeks at a time. I really have no idea how I’m still gainfully employed. I’m clearly just eye candy for the ladies of the office.

My laziness almost knows no bounds. Like all of you though, I want to get ahead financially. What’s a lazy fella to do? Do I sacrifice one for the other? Do I have to make a budget and stick to it, like just about every financial guru tells us to? Hardly. In fact, I’m here to tell you that being lazy can actually be good for your financial picture.

Let’s talk specifically about budgets. Many of you probably have one, in some form or another, in varying degrees of detail. Some people use a cash system, allocating cash for each budget category. Others use spreadsheets or one of the many different finance pieces of software to track their spending. If you use any of those budgets and it’s working for you, then keep using it. Getting ahead financially is the important part, how we get there is but a minor part of the journey.

This is why I don’t have a budget. I’m too lazy to spend time figuring out how much money I want to spend on any of 25 categories. I’m too lazy to rob money from one category when I run short in another. Luckily for everyone, there’s a much easier way. It’s so easy I can explain it in just one sentence.

All you need to do is pay yourself first.

If you want to save 10% of your income, just set up an automatic withdrawal each time a paycheque enters your account. Any bank can set this up for you in a matter of minutes. The 10% magically disappears instantly, off to some other account that’s earmarked for investment. Then, feel free to spend the rest. I don’t care what you spend it on either. Have a fancy for Starbucks? Drink away. Just make sure you don’t touch those savings.

Once you set up the automatic transfer, all the work is done. Paying yourself first is the easiest way to get yourself to start saving money. The simplicity of paying yourself first is the real appeal to the plan. A lot of people start a budget, do great for a month or two, and then fall off the wagon. Either some unexpected expense comes and busts a budget category, or the person making the budget gets tired of the work. For whatever reason, the budget fails and the person making the budget is back into financial difficulty.

Unless you’re some sort of budgeting master, you have 10% worth of wiggle room in your budget. If someone has $500 to last them until next payday, people are generally pretty good at making it stretch the amount they need. When faced with scarcity, people find cutting out extras easy. So why not artificially create yourself some scarcity?

People are typically bad at determining the difference between wants and needs. I’ve seen budgets that have an allocation to things like manicures or golf. I understand we all have our vices, but these vices directly cut into savings. If you have to make the choice between golf and food, usually food wins out.

I spend zero time every month figuring out what I can spend on categories. I know approximately how much money I can spend every month, and then do it. In the meanwhile, my savings are slowly accumulating in a different account, ready to be put to work in whatever investment I decide. It leaves me all sorts of time to play video games, hang out with my friends, or to sit around and do nothing, an activity I’m particularly fond of. If you’re so detail oriented you feel the need to know where each dollar goes, then maybe budgeting is the ticket. If you’re like the rest of us, people who want to get ahead using a minimal effort, then I’d recommend paying yourself first.

Remember folks, simplicity is best.

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Why I Don’t Have A Budget originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on June 30, 2011.

Therefore, when it comes to your personal finance, you may have come to the realization that the standard line by line budget does not work for you. Perhaps you have wrestled with it and attacked it, and forced it to become a weekly rite, like prayer or fasting, though you hardly understand what you are doing and why it hurts so much. In that case, I would suggest reorganizing your financial information into a style that you better understand.

Financial Calendar

Over the last week I made for myself a financial calendar. I used Google’s calendar, so that I could share it with my wife, but you can use any software program or physical calendar you would like. In order to create this calendar, what I did was go over my financial statements for the last month, determined every expense that was reoccurring, and plot when I pay bills onto the chronological map. Using the “repeat” function of an event, I set up paychecks, bills, debt payments and anything else that regularly came out of my bank account to show up on the calendar the date and the amount that would be coming out.

What this does is two very important things. First, it shows you just how much money you are spending, and exactly when you are spending it. Understandably, there were a number of expenses that came out of at the end of the month. I thought that most of our bills did. However, I was actually quite surprised at how many expenses came out at the beginning of the month – on the 1st or the 2nd. So even though I had been feeling “safe” when our bank account was at a healthy balance at the end of the month, more things were coming out of it the first week of the next month.

Second, it allows me to plan ahead. I have a week of vacation coming up, and I already know exactly how much money is going to be coming out of my account during that week of vacation. Knowing this, I can plan to make sure that there is enough money around to pay for those bills and expenses while also being sure to enjoy my time off work.

While all of these things are very possible to do simply through text and numbers, visualizing it on a week by week basis really allows you to see things from a different angle. Even if you don’t need to create a calendar to get a grasp of your finances, it might be worthwhile to do it anyways just to see if you can spot something you hadn’t before. Expenses can pop up out of nowhere and this can put your budget under strain. Things such as emergency home or car repairs. One option is to turn to someone like Wonga for short term finance. But this is why saving is paramount – so you have funds set aside for emergencies.

Extra Credit

Do you have a financial calendar?

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Making a Financial Calendar originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on June 15, 2011.

If you are constantly feeling bad about yourself, or a situation, then it would be no surprise if you also felt the need to spend money on small or large things to make you feel better. Here’s a couple steps to identify whether or not you have this problem and what you can do to change it.

Identify the Problem

Trying to figure out if you are facing emotional difficulties can be hard for a lot of us. Tying that together to your finances can be downright impossible. The best thing to do is to ask a close friend that you trust what they think. It often takes an outside eye to determine these things for you. If you don’t have that option, the best thing you can do is grab your financial transactions over the last month. Write them down into two different categories. Split them between necessary and planned expenses that happen every month, like rent and bills, and impulse purchases. It might be a movie you decided to see at the last minute, or a chocolate bar or two that you picked up while grocery shopping. Now, go through each of those impulse purchases one by one and try to remember what you were feeling when you made that purchase. Were you upset because of problems at work? Were you sad because of something your friend said? Or were you just excited by something that you saw? If you determine that the majority of your emotions were negative when you made impulse purchases, it may be that you have a self worth/net worth problem.

While you are at it, total up your impulse purchases over the last month. Perhaps seeing it all added up together will give you a little shock to the system that could help you when you find yourself at the checkout with six boxes of frozen pizzas.

Replace the Good Feeling

One good step to take would be to find something else, other than purchases, that make you feel good. Maybe a nice cup of home brewed coffee just makes you feel cozy and safe, or perhaps you just need a good chat with your best friend. Whatever it is, find something in your life that gives you the same sort of feeling that you get when you purchase something nice for yourself. If you can’t find anything that’s equivalent, try to determine if there is something inexpensive you can purchase that will give you the same emotional boost as a more expensive purchase. Instead of a new pair of shoes, you might just buy a small bag of chips. Personally, when I was in college, I found that going to the library and getting out a stack of books made me feel like there was the possibility of a good future – even if the books didn’t turn out to be as good as expected, just the feeling that there was hope for a good read gave me a quick emotional high.

Cure the Cause

If you have identified the problem and taken some steps to replace the good feeling, please recognize that it is only a stopgap for your finances while you struggle. Ideally, you will work together with someone to get at the root of the problem. Stopping your impulse purchases is a great step to take, but it won’t keep you from having low self esteem. If you can get rid of the reason you are feeling down, like the woman did in the aforementioned article by getting out of an abusive relationship, then you might find that the financial implications will solve themselves.

Have you ever struggled with a low sense of self worth? How did it impact your net worth?

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Self Worth and Net Worth originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on May 4, 2011.

Track Your Spending

The more debt you have, the more you should put aside each month toward payments. Tracking your spending will show you where your money is going. What unnecessary spending is there? Are you wasting money? Track your spending to determine how to set up your budget, and continue tracking your spending to ensure you are staying within your budget.

Pay Off Your Highest Interest Loans First

Make the minimum payments on all your debt every month. This will make sure you don’t damage your credit. After that, focus all excess cash on the debt with the highest interest rate. Usually, that will be credit card debt. Pay off the highest card or loan first to minimize the amount of interest you pay in the long run.

Once the highest rate loan is paid off, focus everything on the next highest loan and so on. As you begin to pay off cards and loans, the amount of money going to each one will grow because you’ll have fewer payments.

Pay Off your Debt Faster

Some people are fine paying the minimum payments each month and maybe a little extra now and then. The problem with this is that it will take a lot longer to pay off, and you’ll pay a lot extra in interest. You are postponing all your financial goals as a result, goals such as saving for retirement, buying a house, and sending your kids to college.

Now is the time to make some sacrifices. Obviously, you’re not good at making financial sacrifices or else you wouldn’t be in debt. Acquiring the self-discipline now will help you now and in the long run.

• Downgrade your lifestyle.
• Live in a less expensive apartment.
• Cut cable television.
• Don’t eat out.
• Don’t buy new clothes.
• Go to the library instead of the bookstore.
• Stay home instead of going to the movies or taking a drive.
• Use coupons, and cut out junk food.

You don’t have to cut out everything you love to make a bigger dent in your debt. Cut back by half and then adjust it from there. You will soon experience complete debt relief and a sudden influx of extra money each month, money that was once going to debt payments.

Prepare for the Future

Use that extra money to prepare for the future. Save 8 months of living expenses in a high interest savings account. Set up a plan for retirement. Put money aside for big purchases such as electronics or vacations instead of using credit. Pay off your debt and avoid further problems with better money management practices.

Author Bio: Samantha Kay is a regular writer for Debt Consolidation Advice, a debt relief blog. She covers the debt relief industry as a whole and provides helpful advice on debt consolidation, credit counseling and other various money-saving tips.

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How to Get Out of Debt When You Can’t Manage Your Money originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on April 21, 2011.