Kirk Ramsay

07/29/2024

People often get self-conscious about their finances because they think other people have more money than them.

They see the fancy dinners, vacation photos, big house, new truck.

But of course, what you don’t see is the bank account balance.

You don’t see the truck or mortgage payment. The credit card bill. The TFSA contribution room going unused.

You don’t see the size of the gift received from their parents for the down payment. You don’t see the late nights or the early mornings or any of the other sacrifices made.

In short, you don’t see the full picture. Not even close.

Appearances can be deceiving. Sometimes the person who seems the wealthiest in fact has the least. Or sometimes the wealth was earned through sacrifices that would make no sense for you to make.

Either way, I get that it’s hard to not compare yourself to your neighbour, or coworkers, or good friends. It’s basically impossible to stop it altogether.

But you can try to make those comparisons more fair, or at least acknowledge the ways in which the comparisons are unfair and keep in mind how very little you actually know.

It might help lessen the self-consciousness or sense of shame or embarrassment that you feel. And that might make it easier to make progress in your own life.

07/25/2024

People who live within their means are often viewed as boring or dull, joyless and miserable. Like they aren’t living life to its fullest.

But I disagree.

And would argue just the opposite—that people who live beyond their means are actually more miserable in the long run, and that people who regularly save and invest, and are on track with their financial goals more generally, actually enjoy life most.

And it’s not hard to understand why.

When you’re constantly behind on bills, living in debt, failing to make progress toward your long-term goals…that sucks! It’s stressful and no fun at all. Overspending on vacations, concerts, cars, clothes or whatever else, typically produces short-term happiness at best. Fleeting hits that tend to fade fast.

With regularly saving and investing and sticking to a budget, you tend to get less of those quick hits, but what you get instead is far more lasting and durable. A sense of satisfaction and forward direction. Less stress and anxiety. Peace of mind.

And you tend to enjoy the money you do spend even more. There’s no guilt or shame or mixed feelings about spending it, because you know it’s your spending money. Money you saved up and set aside to spend on things you want and that will bring you joy.

I know it’s not as simple as making a choice to do one or the other, and there are many legitimate reasons why people find it hard to save money or stick to a budget. No judgement here.

But either way, it can still be helpful to shift your perspective around spending and to understand that in the long run overspending is no fun at all and living within your means is far more enjoyable than it might appear to be at first.

There will still be tradeoffs, you’ll need to occasionally delay gratification and use some discipline, but having the right system in place for managing your money can also help huge.

If you’re looking for some guidance on that last bit, shoot me a message!

07/21/2024

One of the worst things about personal finance content is how often it leaves people feeling ashamed.

Like they’re not doing the right things.

Like they’re missing out on all these great investment opportunities.

Like they need to make better choices or be doomed to live in debt forever.

So much of what gets said takes a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s often, “Hey this worked for me, so it will work for you. You should do it. Why aren’t you doing it yet?”

And I think the fact that so much of it revolves around numbers makes the feeling even worse. Numbers feel black and white, quantifiable and objective. You can’t argue with math.

But personal finance isn’t actually like that. There is no one-size-fits-all solution and what the numbers say is just one small piece of the puzzle.

There are so many other factors: what you value, what stage of life you’re in, your history and previous experiences with money, how you think and feel and see the world.

Advice needs to be tailored to fit you and your unique situation. It needs to take everything into account.

What might look good or make sense on paper, might not work well for you.

And that’s not because you’re wrong, or broken, or dumb.

It’s because you’re you. Doing your own thing. Living your own life.

In my job, I do help people run the numbers, and there are some basic truths and general principles that apply to most people.

But I also encounter unique people in unique situations every week. And the thing that those people need most is not a piece of absolute advice that may or may not apply.

What they need is to be heard and understood. What they need is someone to talk to without the fear of judgement.

So much of the advice you’ll see online gets this wrong and it puts people in an emotional state where they’re even less likely to take the first step toward a better future.

07/18/2024

The great thing about index investing is that you don’t have to pick the winners.

Much of the recent gain in the US stock market has been driven by just a handful of companies: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Amazon.

But if you own an ETF with the S&P 500 index, you already own all those companies!

It’s funny. When you look at a portfolio of your investments and see just one ETF name and one number, or even just a few, it can somehow feel riskier than seeing a bunch of different stocks and a bunch of different numbers.

But owning individual companies is far riskier! Think about how hard it would be to pick these companies, and only these companies, to do so year after year, and to perfectly time when you buy and sell each stock so that you don’t give away all your gains. It’s way harder, takes way more time and adds way more stress.

You could’ve just bought the S&P 500 (or a more diversified ETF that includes it) and called it a day.

If you’re already doing that, you can sit back and relax, knowing you already own a piece of all the hot names you see in the headlines every week.

06/29/2024

The most important rate in personal finance isn’t the one that’s talked about most often.

You hear far more about interest rates, inflation rates, mortgage rates, treasury rates, insurance rates, growth rates and rates of return.

And to some extent, all those rates matter, at least to the broader economy.

But for you, in particular, the single most important rate is the only one that’s in your direct, immediate control—your savings rate.

To an underestimated extent, your financial future depends on the rate at which you save money every month. By how much does your income exceed your expenses, and how much of that surplus do you manage to squirrel away into savings and investment accounts?

That’s the long and short of it. The TLDR. The whole enchilada, the whole nine yards, and the whole ball game. It is the thing. Supreme.

If I was only able to use one number and one number alone to predict how well someone’s financial future was going to go, the rate at which they save would be the number.

If you’re in your wealth building years, most of your focus belongs on increasing your savings rate. Almost all the other good stuff is downstream of that.

06/25/2024

Most people don’t know what they want. They just don’t.

Because it’s hard to know! Sometimes we get what we want, and we’re miserable. Other times, we get something different, and are pleasantly surprised.

What we want changes as we age and learn, meet new people and experience new things. We develop new tastes, new preferences, new desires.

We have to constantly keep rediscovering what we want. Or perhaps, we get to constantly engage in this dance with desire, influencing and shaping the things we want, figuring out what truly brings us joy.

The mistake is assuming you do. Thinking you know for certain what you want. Blindly believing that what you want is never going to change, despite how much and how frequently it’s changed in the past.

Look back ten years. Think about what you wanted then.

How different was that person and what they desired?

Now flash forward ten years and think about what you might want.

Somehow that’s much harder to imagine. We tend to think we’ll want more or less what we want now.

But we won’t. Wanting different things is a part of life.

The best we can do is continue to update what we think our preferences are as we get new information.

And to plan for change.

Because it’s constant.

06/20/2024

Sometimes when I sit down with a couple and start chatting with them about their finances, I’ll ask a question that both of them have thought about but never actually talked about.

It’s a super common and easy thing to do in a relationship.

You think and think and think about something. Mull it over. Start formulating a plan in your head. And somehow, you just kind of assume your partner has been reading your mind the entire time, and that you’re totally on the same page, even though you haven’t actually said anything about it out loud.

And then you’re chatting with me in person or over zoom and you’re giving this answer that you’ve THOUGHT about a lot, but I can tell from the look on your partner’s face that you haven’t in fact TALKED about it at all and that you aren’t in fact anywhere close to being on the same page.

And then the real discussion begins. And we go through the process of talking through and looking at everyone’s different perspectives and figuring out how to reconcile them into a plan that everyone can get on board with.

Surfacing these kinds of gaps in communication and facilitating these kinds of discussions is a big part of the work I do with couples to help them start rowing in the same direction and create the sense that they’re working together toward shared goals.

06/17/2024

With the recent wave of inflation and higher interest rates and high home prices and high grocery bills and high prices at the pump and high tuition costs—well, lots of people feel tempted to give up.

Why bother? Who cares? You’re never going to have enough to buy a home or retire at a reasonable age, anyway. The deck’s stacked against you.

And you know what, for a lot of people, that’s not untrue.

It’s true that wages have not kept up with home prices, or the cost of living more generally. In some ways, younger generations have faced a tougher, more competitive economic environment.

But you can’t let those larger forces rob you of your personal responsibility and agency and power.

It kills me when I see young people, people in their 20s and 30s, people with so much time, and who somehow already feel defeated, like there’s no point in starting now, like they have no ability at all to improve their financial future.

It’s heartbreaking.

If you’re in your 20s or 30s, even your 40s or 50s, you have so much time. You have so much power to make things better.

Like yes, starting early is fantastic. The sooner you get started with saving and investing, the better. There’s no doubt about that.

But even if you’re starting late. Even if you’re starting at zero. Even if you’re in debt. There are always things you can do to improve your financial situation. And the more you do those things, the more options you’ll have, and the bigger steps you’ll be able to take over time.

If you’re currently feeling hopeless about your finances, that might still sound unrealistic to you.

And that’s okay. It’s okay to feel however you’re feeling.

But don’t mistake that feeling for fact.

Because there is in fact reason for hope. There’s always reason for hope.

06/14/2024

If you want to minimize your cost of insurance over your lifetime, it’s super important to think about how long you’re going to need the coverage for.

A common mistake is to get life insurance for ten years (because it’s often the cheapest option in the short run), when in fact you’re going to need coverage for twenty years, and maybe even some coverage for your entire life.

The issue is that rates go up as you grow up. So when your ten year policy expires and you still need insurance coverage, you’re going to pay way more than if you had just gotten a twenty year policy to begin with.

Lots of people find themselves in this situation because the ins and outs of insurance can get confusing fast, and insurance salespeople rarely take the time to explain it all clearly.

And it’s not the end of the world. It’s just not optimal for minimizing your cost of insurance.

The point to remember is that you generally want the length of the insurance policy to line up with the length of time that you’re going to need the coverage, and that when you pay the lowest amount possible in the short term, you usually end up paying more in the long run.

05/31/2024

Four examples of conversations I've had with clients in the past week:

1. Helped a couple who recently bought a home with a bigger mortgage re-examine their life insurance needs and get new policies to make sure they’re covered

2. Helped someone going through a divorce open a new bank account with a higher interest rate, start organizing their other financial documents, and began the process of figuring out what next steps might make sense

3. Coached a client through considering their various mortgage options, consolidating debt, and how a HELOC might fit into the picture eventually

4. Reviewed a client’s current cash flow and the automated deposits they have set up to help them gain some clarity and get a clearer picture of exactly where everything is going

There is so much more to personal finance than managing investments.

In fact, most of the conversations I have every week have almost nothing to do with markets or returns.

Send a message to learn more

05/30/2024

As a general rule, if you’re looking for a mortgage or insurance policy or higher interest savings account, you’re far better off going to a broker than a bank.

When I say broker, I mean someone who can actually shop around and get you the best rate or best policy, and who isn’t restricted to selling products from only one place.

The way the financial industry is set up in Canada is super messed up on this point. You would think your bank has a responsibility to do what’s best for you, but they don’t and they often can’t.

When your mortgage is up for renewal, they’re not going to tell you to go down the street to the other guy. They’re not going to tell you about a savings account with a way higher interest rate. They’re not going to educate you about your options and let you decide. They’re going to do what serves them best.

It’s a brutal system and it leaves millions of Canadians underserved.

The most important thing you can do is know that you do have options, that brokers exist, and that you deserve products that serve you best.

This is one of the big reasons Tallkirk Financial Group is proudly independent. Because it means we can actually do what’s best for you.

02/24/2024

Another day, another big bank horror story.

Single man. No kids. Retired with a pension. Wants to spend every last dime before he goes.

Him: “I don’t want to be the richest man in the graveyard.”

Bank employee: “Oh, but I want you to be!”

He was treated like a number. What he wanted was ignored. And it was obvious to him that they were putting the bank’s interests before his own.

I’ve heard so many similar stories it’s unreal. How is this kind of interaction still so common?

Wherever you decide to keep your money, you should feel seen and heard and that the whole interaction revolves around what you want.

If that hasn’t been your experience to date, just know there are in fact better options out there.