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IO - 'WHITCHURCH-STOUFFVILLE THIS MONTH" - Seeus on ‘www.stoufivilleonlinexom‘ wwwsASSVeuuii'eaLCox 6397 Main St., Stoufl'ville' 905- 642-9864 Woo “when. rd Wm 6188 Main St. Stouffville 905-642-2927 Doing your own taxes can be pretty unnerving. Leave it to the professionals to help you relax. And get every tax benefit you deserve. It's just another part of HR Block Advantage Call 1-800-HRBLOCK 0! visit hrblodua. jus‘ plain smart' ”BLOCK From single items to full estates. we can help you dispose of unwanted furniture, housewares. jewellery and antiques UNWANTED A w'ealthy muffin eater, coffee drinker’s guide to solvency by Ivor Deficit Financial Editor According to a recent financial planning bestseller, The Automatic Millionaire. if we were to forego our morning coffee and muffin habit we would save $5 a day. Small change. but it adds up to thousands of dollars over the course of our working lives. This compellingly simple advice - - give up your carb 'n' caffeine fix today. and you can look forward to a timeshare in the Bahamas at retire- ment instead of looking for the least dented cans of tuna at the local Price Chopper -- was iust what I needed. I was desperate to find a route to financial security. and was convinced this book was it. NWAN I El) Trea‘sara $‘3’ As I read. a lifetime of financial dissipation flashed before me ~ the muffins. the croissants. the donuts, the coffee, the newspapers. the mag- azines, the gum -- year after year of nickel-and-diming my way to the poor house. Was financial redemp- tion still possible? The first thing I learned was that to finish wealthy you must start early. If I'd put SIO of my weekly earnings as a student waitress in I975 into an RRSP. today my‘ portfolio would be worth hall a million dollars, through the miracle of compounding. To catch up to where I needed to be financial- Th'e next piece of advice was that you must pay yourself first -- put aside a small percentage of every Iy in my 40's I realized I would need another kind of miracle. But I refused to be discomaged. I read on! 2 Fl ogolflecta'lfle ques paycheque into a separate bank account. So I arranged with my bank to channel $l0 from my paycheque into a special account each payday. Before long, there was $200 sitting around in there so I decided to celebrate by buying m y s e | f I'd been avoiding this chapter as it dealt with credit cards â€" the finan- cial albatrosses around the necks of most middle class consumers. I Ieamed if you incur a credit charge of $l,500 at 18 percent interest and make only minimum payments. it will take you 30 years to pay off the debt. I considered the outstanding bal- ances on my own cards, and did some quick calculations as to when the cards would be paid off. This was rather disconcerting. Even though longevity runs in my family I wasn't sure I was going to make it to I I2. The book also advised that you obtain your credit history. l visualâ€" ized this repository of my credit card sins and excesses -- outstanding bal- ances, missed payments, late pay- ments, exceeded limits -- bloated, terrifying. like the picture of Dorian Gray, waiting to be revealed in all its honor. Knowing what awaited me if i contacted the credit bureau, I decide to skip to the next chapter. which dealt with retirement. I learned that the only guarantee of financial survival in retirement is having an RRSP. But again. timing is everything. If at age 25 I had put $3,000 a year into an RRSP with an annual return of IO percent, at the age of 65 I would have had a nest egg of 5L6 million, I quickly compared my situation and determined that given my contribution rate of $l00 a year at the current return rate of LS percent. my retirement nest egg would be considerably less. This meant ‘l was running the risk of outliving my savings. yirtually every financial advice book and article i have read debmlnouhotn: Tim-ytosuuduywamtoepm Smdnybychmoo may present moral or ethical conflicts for those with religious backgrounds, however there are a number of excellent web- sites to help impecuniOus pension- ers come to terms with the situation. A particularly good one is w. Kevorkiancom. I've bookmarked it [or future reference. By the end of the book I had grown discouraged. There seemed to be no strategies available to ensure my financial future. I felt like the chronically overweight person who had tried every imaginable diet. hadn't lost a pound and was now desperate enough to try anything. Was there a financial equivalent to gastric by-pass surgery, I wondered. I flipped the pages of The Automatic Millionaire a final time and closed the book. I noticed the price on the dust iacket -- $29495 -- as I shelved the book beside all the oth- ers -- Money lOl, Money 20l. The Idiot's Guide to Getting Rich, the Idiot's Guide'to Managing Money, The Wealthy Barber. The Wealthy Boomer, Smart Women Finish Rith, and all the similar volumes that filled the bookcase. Then the idea hit me! If I stopped buying personal finance advice books at $30 each. I could save hun- dreds of dollars. And that's \what I did. With the money I saved over the next six months I purchased hun- dreds of lottery tickets and eventu- ally my financial ship came in. Last month I won a $5 million Super 7 iackpot. So now if you'll excuse me. I'm off to Tim Horton's for a great cup of coffee and a Cranberry Sensation muffin. sav- ings". This imperative MAY 2004