You Can't Take it With You - Common-Sense Estate Planning for Canadians

Author and CNN veteran money correspondent Christine Romans believes we should live by three qualifiers: living within our means, living with less debt, and being less vulnerable. While some may say this is old-fashioned, today it's hard to argue with Romans' view.

Smart is the New Rich explores how adopting a new approach to money can lead to a healthier financial lifestyle. Each chapter opens with a question about money to begin the conversation about earning, saving, spending, growing, and protecting your money. Using checklists and quizzes, Romans guides you through the "New Normal," helping you to think differently about your money and relearning good habits for prosperity.

• Reexamines the money rules abandoned during the consumer bubble and poses the essential questions we should ask ourselves before spend our money
• Provides an interactive, step-by-step guide to all things money, from credit, debt, and savings to investing, taxes, and mortgages
• A companion Web site allows you to chat with other readers about jobs, mortgage rates, investing, and saving

An accessible guide that contains the tools needed to find trustworthy financial assistance

Given the events of the past two years-from bankruptcies to financial scams-it is more important than ever that investors understand who they are hiring to handle their finances.

Getting Started in Finding a Financial Advisor explores the important relationship between an investor and their financial advisor and examines how you should go about finding potential candidates. Along the way, it shows you how to interview and check the credentials of six key types of advisor so that you can spot and avoid rogues, scam artists, and incompetents. You will also learn how to understand what can happen if the institution or the advisor ends up in financial or legal difficulty. This insightful and useful guide

• Helps you determine the kind of advisor best-suited for your situation
• Provides interview questions, discusses what credentials really mean, and which are important
• Explains in detail the issue of fiduciary responsibility of financial advisors, so you can find helpers who are on your side

Friends.--This lecture has been delivered under these circumstances: I visit a town or city, and try to arrive there early enough to see the postmaster, the barber, the keeper of the hotel, the principal of the schools, and the ministers of some of the churches, and then go into some of the factories and stores, and talk with the people, and get into sympathy with the local conditions of that town or city and see what has been their history, what opportunities they had, and what they had failed to do--and every town fails to do something--and then go to the lecture and talk to those people about the subjects which applied to their locality. "Acres of Diamonds"--the idea--has continuously been precisely the same. The idea is that in this country of ours every man has the opportunity to make more of himself than he does in his own environment, with his own skill, with his own energy, and with his own friends. RUSSELL H. CONWELL.

With the subpar performance of the markets, record-high personal debt levels, and shockingly low savings rates, it's clear that many Canadians expecting to retire in the next decade simply don't have a sufficient nest egg to ensure a worry-free retirement. Making matters worse, only about one-third of Canadians currently belong to a formal, or registered, pension plan; and even a large number of that "lucky third" will not retire with a guaranteed pension income.

If you no longer have the time to wait and hope for your traditional investments to pay off, the answer is to "pensionize your nest egg" using the new technique of product allocation set out in this book. Pensionize Your Nest Egg explains how to

• Recognize if you really have a pension or just a tax-sheltered savings plan.
• Become informed about the new risks you and your nest egg face in retirement and why asset allocation, despite its value in the accumulation stage of life, is not sufficient to protect you and your money.
• Measure your retirement sustainability quotient (RSQ) and your Financial Legacy Value (FLV)-then choose a retirement income plan on the Retirement Income Frontier.
• Understand how product allocation differs from asset allocation, how to allocate your nest egg across three product silos, and learn about the new financial products that are available to protect against the new risks you face.
• Follow a seven-step process to close your Pension Income Gap and convert your retirement savings into a secure stream of lifetime income.