How to prepare your finances for maternity leave
By Helen Burnett-Nichols
Expecting your first baby? By all means get the nursery ready — but make sure you put your financial house in order, too.
Preparing for a baby is a time full of celebration, showers and shopping, but the arrival of a little one brings not only added expense for your family but also a noticeable drop in income for many new families. Read more 
Credit 101 for Your Undergraduate
By Melissa Cassar, VISA Canada
If you’ve got teenagers heading off to University or College in the Fall, I hope you’ve done a good job educating them about the importance of personal financial responsibility and how to build a strong credit history. If not, better do it now.
First year students and young adults entering the workforce encounter many unfamiliar expenses – and temptations – so it’s important to help them avoid early financial missteps that could damage their credit for years to come.
Probably the most fundamental tool for helping students manage their finances is a chequing account with a debit card. A few tips: Read more
Preparing your Heirs for Wealth
If you think your heirs are not quite old enough or prepared enough to discuss the wealth they will inherit on your death, you’re not alone. Unfortunately though, this way of thinking can leave your beneficiaries in a decision-making vacuum: an unnecessary predicament which can be avoided by facing your own mortality and making a plan.
If you have a will in place, great. A will, however, is only a fundamental first step, not a comprehensive plan, point out authors of the 2017 Wealth Transfer Report from RBC Wealth Management.
“One generation’s success at building wealth does not ensure the next generation’s ability to manage wealth responsibly, or provide effective stewardship for the future,” they write. “Knowing the value (alone) does little to prepare inheritors for managing the considerable responsibilities of wealth.” Overall, the report’s authors say the number of inheritors who’ve been prepared hovers at just one in three. Read more
Microsoft Corp. is launching a new family caregiver benefit for all employees.
To date, the benefit has rolled out in 22 countries, including in the United States last week. The company will extend the benefit to the remaining countries where it operates, including Canada, over the coming months.
The family caregiver leave allows an employee to take up to four week of fully paid leave to care for an immediate family member with a serious health condition, wrote Kathleen Hogan, executive vice-president of human resources at Microsoft, on her LinkedIn page. Read more
What Non-Retirees Mean for the Workforce
The decision of 72-year-old railway executive Hunter Harrison to pursue a challenging new gig instead of retirement is emblematic of the changing shape of the workforce
For all Hunter Harrison’s unquestionable talents, he is really bad at one thing: not working. The celebrated railway executive officially retired from Canadian National Railway Company (CN) in 2009, after a long career running railways. A little more than two years later, at the encouragement of activist investor Bill Ackman, Harrison came out of retirement to become president and CEO of Canadian Pacific Railway (CP). Read more
