Finding the shortest and safest route to any of your dreams requires planning and only with a carefully thought out financial plan can you be sure to make the most of your resources and to protect against risks along the way. At Worby Wealth Management, Chris will do his best to help you achieve those dreams with a plan that is tailored to your specific needs and based on your individual situation.

1. Communication. 

During the 2008 liquidity crisis, I gained a few extra clients because I was actively in contact with my existing clients and other advisors were not in contact with theirs. The fact is that I, like all the others, did not know what was happening or why – a 50% drop over 2 months will have that effect on you! – but that didn’t keep me from calling and having appointments. I may not have had answers, but it was still my job to provide them access to whatever information was available.

2. Pro-activity. 

This one goes a bit hand in hand with the first one but I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard this, “he calls me at RRSP time and I go write him a cheque and don’t hear from him for a year.” Who is the client in this scenario?! One trick I use for this one is to sometimes book our next appointment at the end of this one – even if it’s going to be 6 months down the line. It keeps us all accountable to meet regularly.

3. Interest. 

I often joke that “you don’t have to be a nerd but you do have to hire one” because the reading I do and enjoy and look forward to would put the average person to sleep in about 3.7 seconds! I like people, I like math, I like psychology, I like markets – I like what I do. I don’t do it because I have to; I do it because I want to. If you are working with someone who has to do something, you know it and you also know mediocrity is the usual companion.

4. Relationship. 

Personally, I don’t get a lot of utility out of a transactional relationship. I like to get to know my clients and I like them to know me. I am a little quirky (aren’t we all) and I like other people’s quirks. I enjoy the eccentricities that make people unique and if we are dealing with transactions – “My guy calls me at RRSP time and I don’t talk to him for a year” – I don’t get a lot of personal reward from that. It makes our work together more personal, I can understand people’s goals better and I can advise them better.

5. Competence. 

This one is difficult to assess in an hour or two of meeting someone however, I think it is fair to ask a new advisor about wins and losses. “Tell me about 3 recommendations you’re proud of and 3 that you aren’t.” There is no possible way that everyone bats 1000 when it comes to recommendations based on the stock market but if someone isn’t willing to discuss it with you, that’s a red flag. This also leads to a talk about investment discipline – and that’s where competence truly lies.

I don’t think it’s out of line to treat a new advisor kind of like they are interviewing for a job. I often think of myself as a household’s Chief Financial Officer – you are the CEO; you’re the one making decisions and ultimately responsible. But within the realm of investments and money management services, I give recommendations for my client's consideration.

Call Chris Worby at (306) 757-4747 ext 226 or on his Cell: (306) 737-2909. Check out his listing on the Regina Directory in the REGINA FINANCIAL SERVICES category. Chris Worby is a Trusted REGINA FINANCIAL ADVISOR EXPERT

Some of the services that Worby Wealth Management can help you with: 

• Insurance Advice
• Investments
• Wealth Management Services
• Pay Less Tax With Tax Planning 
• Become Mortgage-Free Faster With Financial Education 
• Estate Planning 
• Retirement Planning 

TRUSTED REGINA FINANCIAL ADVISOR Chris Worby from Worby Wealth Management helps you live your dream!

Finding the shortest and safest route to any of your dreams requires planning and only with a carefully thought out financial plan can you be sure to make the most of your resources and to protect against risks along the way. At Worby Wealth Management, Chris will do his best to help you achieve those dreams with a financial plan that is tailored to your specific needs and based on your individual situation.

Let TRUSTED REGINA's FINANCIAL ADVISOR Chris Worby from Worby Wealth Management help you live your dream!

Here Chris Shares A Tip About Too Much Stuff:

Too Much Stuff? What to keep…

If you’re like me, you find yourself with stuff – lots of stuff – all over the place. In a lifetime, we accumulate and accumulate and it’s hard to know what to throw out.

By no means exhaustive, this article has some good ways to catalogue stuff and may give you some ideas on how to keep your stuff sorted.

The following is an entertaining article:

George Carlin and the new retirement minimalism

It is finally spring. Among the rituals of spring is spring cleaning. 

Comedian and colorful social observer George Carlin described a house as "just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.” Spring-cleaning is an opportunity to sort that stuff — making the option of downsizing possible, ageing-in-place easier, or simply helping family members make sense out of all that “stuff” you have accumulated for decades. 

Over an adult lifetime, you collect your stuff, family stuff and legal stuff. Here are some ideas on what to do with it. 

Your stuff is everything under your roof. However, as you approach retirement, or may already be in retirement, that stuff makes life and future housing choices more difficult. The more you have, the more there is to maintain, clean and organize. A house full of furniture that was once the home of a family of five, but now only has two, makes the decision to downsize difficult. Moreover, should something happen to one member of a couple, a home's contents can be a near-insurmountable burden to manage and ultimately sort out. A new ritual of retirement may be the adoption of new retirement minimalism — eliminating items that are in the house because ... well because they have always been there. Even if you don't want to downsize to another home, consider what you can downsize while staying in the home you are in. 

Family stuff used to include furniture, glassware, tableware and a long list of family artifacts such as great grandfather Joe's steamer trunk. Lifestyles have changed and keeping and handing down family “things” has become less important. Just consider the fact that the children of the baby boomers — the millennials — aren't following the same life course timetable or preferences of previous generations. They are marrying later in life. Choosing to have fewer or no children. Moreover, the homes they are choosing, many in urban areas, are smaller. Consequently, mom's dining room set doesn't have a place to go and, even if your children have a need for a crib, chances are the one in your attic it is out of style or painted with something that has been, or will be determined to be hazardous. 

Family stuff today is about memories that can neither be bought nor replaced. Photos across the generations that are annotated identify who is in the photo and their relationship to children and grandchildren. Family videos that have been copied to the most current medium — no your VHS player isn't worth keeping. Even your own audio stories are recorded to memorialize family history. All of these items can be safely kept in the cloud, occupy little space, accessed by everyone while preserving generations of memories. 

Legal stuff includes important documents that you and your family need access to for managing legal, financial and health matters that will become more critical as you age. The list can be long but includes legal and financial records for real estate, wills, health proxies, medical orders and desired intentions, insurance policies, inventories and the assessed value of the insured property, investment records, bank account locations, etc. These documents, along with an up-to-date list of contacts for attorneys, financial advisers, accountants, physicians should be organized, discussed with selected family and friends, and copies maintained in the home as well as with the appropriate professional, e.g., a lawyer that assisted with will writing. 

Like spring itself, life after work is an opportunity to start new. Retirement spring-cleaning through all that stuff makes considering alternative housing options possible, simplifies life in older age, and can be an invaluable gift to loved ones. 

Warning: May contain offensive language. 

Check out his listing on the Regina Directory in the REGINA FINANCIAL SERVICES category. 

• Insurance Advice
• Investments
• Wealth Management Services
• Pay Less Tax With Tax Planning 
• Become Mortgage-Free Faster With Financial Education 
• Estate Planning 
• Retirement Planning 

TRUSTED REGINA FINANCIAL ADVISOR Chris Worby from Worby Wealth Management helps you live your dream!

Finding the shortest and safest route to any of your dreams requires planning and only with a carefully thought out financial plan can you be sure to make the most of your resources and to protect against risks along the way. At Worby Wealth Management, Chris will do his best to help you achieve those dreams with a plan that is tailored to your specific needs and based on your individual situation.

Helping Clients Make Wise Financial Choices:

My Client Is Making a Terrible Financial Choice. What Do I Do?

When panic drives someone to make a self-destructive money decision, it's the financial adviser's job to protect the client from himself.

Suppose one of my clients has his heart set on using half of his retirement account to buy each of his grandchildren a new car. Or a client in a panic over falling markets wants to sell all her stocks and buy gold. What is my responsibility as their financial planner? How far should planners go to try to keep clients from making serious financial mistakes?

It’s important for planners to respect clients’ competence and ability to make their own life decisions. Client-centred planners also need to remember that the goal is to help clients get what they want, not what the planner might want or think the client should want. On the other hand, should a planner stand idly by and watch someone walk off what the planner perceives as the edge of a financial cliff?

Part of the answer to this dilemma stems from a planner’s legal obligation. Most advisers who sell financial products have no fiduciary duty and are not legally required to put their customers’ interests first. Fiduciary advisers, which include those who are fee-only, do have a legal obligation to act in their clients’ best interests.

What is the legal responsibility, then, of a fiduciary planner who believes clients are about to do themselves financial harm?

Let’s say I have a client who is about to do something that may be viewed by a court of law as “extreme” or “imprudent.” (An example would be putting all his money into one asset class like gold, cash, or penny stocks.) At the minimum, I would need to protect myself by carefully fulfilling my legal responsibilities. This would include making certain I emphasized to the client that, given the research and data available, his actions could hurt him financially. I also would want to be sure the client fully understood and took responsibility for his actions.

In terms of the broader aspect of what financial planners owe to their clients, meeting this legal obligation is not enough. In my view, fiduciary planners’ obligation to put clients’ interests first includes an ethical responsibility to do no harm. Sometimes this ethical and legal responsibility requires planners to give clients the information they may not want to hear.

As we focus on the clients’ goals and help them carry out their wishes, part of our role is to make sure they have all the information they need. This gives us a responsibility to educate ourselves so the advice we offer is as sound as we can make it. We also need to do whatever we can to help clients hear and understand that advice.

Clients who are hovering on the edge of a financial cliff are typically about to act out of strong emotions such as fear. They often can’t take in financial advice until they are able to move through that fear. It only makes things worse if financial advisers shame clients, bully them, or abandon them to their fears. The challenge for planners is to help clients reach a more rational place so they can gather additional information and make decisions that will serve them well.

With the right kind of support, clients are almost always able to get past the fear that is pushing them to make imprudent decisions. Providing such support by working with clients’ emotions and beliefs about money, perhaps with the help of a financial therapist or financial coach, is well within a financial planner’s ethical responsibility. Our role is not merely to do no harm. It is also to use all the tools we have to help clients act in their own best interests. 

Check out his listing on the Regina Directory in the REGINA FINANCIAL SERVICES category. Chris is a Trusted REGINA FINANCIAL EXPERT

Some of the services that Worby Wealth Management can help you with: 

• Insurance Advice
• Investments
• Wealth Management Services
• Pay Less Tax With Tax Planning 
• Become Mortgage-Free Faster With Financial Education 
• Estate Planning 
• Retirement Planning 

TRUSTED REGINA FINANCIAL ADVISOR Chris Worby from Worby Wealth Management helps you live your dream!

Finding the shortest and safest route to any of your dreams requires planning and only with a carefully thought out financial plan can you be sure to make the most of your resources and to protect against risks along the way. At Worby Wealth Management, Chris will do his best to help you achieve those dreams with a plan that is tailored to your specific needs and based on your individual situation.

Let Trusted Regina Financial Adisir Chris Worby of  Worby Wealth Management help you live your dream!

Using a Safety Net:

Worby Wealth Management a Trusted Regina Financial Consultant talks about your Emergency Fund.

Say in the same month you have your water heater go, your car needs $2500 worth of work and you have to take an emergency trip to see an ailing relative. Where is that money going to come from? Many people know we should save a few months’ worth of expenses for the ‘just in case’ times but very few people know how to.

• How much money should be in an emergency fund?

• How to build one

• How to use it for annual ‘fun’ items I’ve heard it said that you should have 3 to 6 months’ worth of expenses handy on a ‘just in case’ basis.

I generally think a dollar amount is a better idea. Think of how much makes sense for you but a good guideline is somewhere in the $10,000 to $15,000 range – that is enough money to deal with most household’s finances for a couple of months in the event of job loss or such but still allows for funds to go towards longer terms goals like retirement.

Building one can be difficult but really, the best way is to set up a high interest rate account separate from your regular chequing account and send money there from every paycheque. Now that you know what your goal amount is, you can target that and, if you want to go from $0 to $10,000 over the course of 4 years, it’s going to be $2500/yr or about $100/bi-weekly. It may take some time to build this up so I often recommend using tax returns or some other once a year source of funds like bonuses to get this done more quickly.

Finally, I get asked how to budget for an annual trip or some such pretty regularly – this fund can help. Say it’s established and you are ticking along just fine at around $12,000 and you have decided this is good for your household. Once that fund gets above that amount, you have spending money! Say you want to take the family to Mexico during the winter every now and then, whenever you have $17,000 (if it costs $5000), you are free to go. Emergency funds, they are helpful and very few people have them. Give me a call or email and we can figure out how to get one up and running for you.

Chris Worby is a Trusted Regina financial advisor and Wealth Management consultant servicing local Regina households and businesses since 2001.

Some of the services that Worby Wealth Management can help you with: 

• Insurance Advice
• Investments
• Wealth Management Services
• Pay Less Tax With Tax Planning 
• Become Mortgage-Free Faster With Financial Education 
• Estate Planning 
• Retirement Planning 

TRUSTED REGINA FINANCIAL ADVISOR Chris Worby from Worby Wealth Management helps you live your dream!

Finding the shortest and safest route to any of your dreams requires planning and only with a carefully thought out financial plan can you be sure to make the most of your resources and to protect against risks along the way. At Worby Wealth Management, Chris will do his best to help you achieve those dreams with a plan that is tailored to your specific needs and based on your individual situation.

Let Trusted Regina Financial Adisir Chris Worby of  Worby Wealth Management help you live your dream!

Get Happy with your Money! 

I talk with a lot of people about their finances – a lot – and if there’s anything I have learned it is that people are not happy with their money. They feel guilty about their spending and savings habits, feel they need to justify purchases and always end the month without.

Mike Rowe, host of ‘Dirty Jobs’ answered this to someone who was having a hard time finding a job they were ‘happy’ with:

Happiness doesn’t come from a job. It comes from knowing what you truly value, and behaving in a way that’s consistent with those beliefs.

Every household, no matter what stage of life – married, single, divorced, retired, etc – can benefit from considering their values as it relates to their finances, investing, goal setting, etc. Once the values have been established, the decisions become easy.

Let’s talk about these values for a few minutes. First, let’s talk about spending. If a household sat down and said, “We value being debt-free,” a number of decisions get really easy. “Should we buy a brand new car that will take us 8 years to pay off?” “Should we buy a brand new house with an accompanying $350,000 mortgage?” “Should we apply this work bonus to our mortgage using a pre-payment option?” Easy questions to answer once the household value is identified.

How about investing? “I value long term growth over safety and low volatility,” is a different statement from, “I value security in my investments.” Each of these investment statements means that many strategies are immediately eliminated and need never be considered again – how’s that for simplifying the decision-making process!

One of the issues here is that some values are ‘better’ than others – or so we think. There is no inherent benefit to valuing security overgrowth or vice versa. The important part is to follow your values so that your investment experience matches your values.

Values-based investing isn’t about the investment itself – it’s about you.

If you don’t know what your values are, contact me and we can figure it out together. 

Chris Worby is a Trusted Regina financial advisor and Wealth Management consultant servicing local Regina households and businesses since 2001.

• Insurance Advice
• Investments
• Wealth Management Services
• Pay Less Tax With Tax Planning 
• Become Mortgage-Free Faster With Financial Education 
• Estate Planning 
• Retirement Planning 

TRUSTED REGINA FINANCIAL ADVISOR Chris Worby from Worby Wealth Management helps you live your dream!