Business owners are quick to insure their business against the loss of property, but the asset you should be protecting might be your valuable employees.   A key employee is anyone whose special skills make a major contribution to the bottom line. Examples include the active business owner, employees who have strong relationships with valued customers, and any employee who has specialized knowledge who cannot be easily replaced. Insurance...

A new school year can be a great time to teach your kids about money. Here’s how to help them shop for supplies and spend their allowance wisely. They’re the age-old questions for families: Should kids get an allowance and how do you decide how much to give? While each family needs to decide what works best for them, here is some advice and common rules-of-thumb to help you. Should children get an allowance? If you decide to give an allowance,...

It’s getting harder to see anything but a messy ending for Canada’s household debt binge. This isn’t the beginning of a lecture on reducing your borrowing. It’s more a resigned observation of human behaviour. You can warn people to act now to avoid a potentially bad outcome in the future, but they’re not likely to do anything unless they see trouble dead ahead. The second quarter of 2016 was a vintage moment in debt accumulation. Incomes rose,...

Rebecca was different from her sixth-grade friends. She didn’t care about social status or Snapchat or fashion. She cared about grades, and she cared about them a lot. By the end of the first semester, she had become so obsessed that her mother contacted me, her school counselor. “She can’t sleep, can’t think about anything else,” she told me. “Every night, she sleeps on our floor drowning in tears....

Retailers are pulling out every trick in the book to lure you in for back-to-school shopping. Here are a few things to keep in mind before you hit the stores. The average family with a child in kindergarten through 12th grade is expected to spend about $674 on everything from pens to computers this year, up 9.6 percent from last year, and up 55 percent from a decade ago, according to the National Retail Federation. So it wouldn’t be smart...

  Though often brief, moments of peace of mind are often intense, rewarding and enjoyable. They often happen in short, powerful bursts. When was the last time you felt peace of mind? And what were you doing when you had this feeling? How you answer these questions can indicate your levels of happiness and fulfillment with your life at home and at work. Peace of mind can be influenced by simple actions such as going for a walk that uncovers...