Archive for May, 2009

How many varieties of Apples do you think there are? No – not the computer, printer, iPod or iPhone! The other kind with the moderately sweet, refreshing flavor and a tartness that is present to greater or lesser degree depending on the variety you choose. The one’s we’ve been eating for the last two and a half million years give or take a few.

The apple tree with more than 7,000 varieties has spread to most temperate regions of the world from Southwestern Asia and Eastern Europe. The first ones were small like apricots and bitter to the taste.  Archeologists have found them fossilized in places where humans once lived in Switzerland. They aren’t sure when apple trees first were grown in orchards but Alexander the Great brought some back from Asia Minor around 300 BC. There were apple orchards in Palestine in the time of Christ and in the 1^st century AD Romans named 36 different varieties of apples/

Over the centuries, many hybrids and cultivars have been developed. For example, Golden and Red Delicious apples are mild and sweet, while Pippins and Granny Smith apples are notably brisk and tart. Tart apples, which best retain their texture during cooking, are often preferred for cooked desserts like apple pie, while Delicious apples and other sweeter varieties like Braeburn and Fuji apples are usually eaten raw.

Apples have long been associated with the biblical story of Adam and Eve, although there is actually no mention that, in fact, the fruit in question was actually an apple. Apples do play a positive part in many religious practices around the world. During the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, people eat honey-dipped apple slices in hopes of ensuring a sweet new year. At Passover Celebrations, Hanoset, a mixture of nuts, wine, spices and apples, is part of the tradition.

In Norse mythology, Idhunn fed golden apples to the Gods in exchange for keeping him young forever. In Irish folk lore King Cormac mac Ari traded his wife and children for a branch of an apple tree with nine golden apples on it which made beautiful music. In Greece there is a story that Mother Earth’s gift to Hera, Queen of the Gods, on her wedding day was the golden apple tree of eternal life.

Apples most recent appearance in history occurred in the 1800s in the U.S., when Johnny Appleseed (a real person named John Chapman, despite the mythological quality of his tale) walked barefoot across an area of 100,000 square miles, planting apple trees throughout the American continent. Boy! And I thought I had sore feet!

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When it comes to heart health, all of us need to keep blood circulating around through our bodies (1,776 gallons get pumped by our hearts every day!), and it’s very important for substances in our blood and the walls of our blood vessels to stay healthy and protected from damage. Antioxidants are one key to heart health, because they help protect our cardiovascular system from oxygen-related damage. Apples contain a long list of phytonutrients that function as antioxidants and support our heart health in this way. Included in this list are quercetin, catechin, phloridzin and chlorogenic acid. To take full advantage of the antioxidants in apples, it’s important to include the skins. Since the skins are also most exposed to the outside world, experts always recommend the purchase of organically-grown apples to minimize the apple skin’s exposure to unwanted pesticide sprays and other potential contaminants.

Antioxidants aren’t the only reason to include apples in a heart-supportive diet. You’ll get about 4 grams of dietary fiber in a medium-sized, 5-ounce apple, or about 15% of the Daily Value (DV) for fiber. Included in this total amount is both insoluble fiber (like cellulose) and soluble fiber (like pectin). Studies have shown that both types of fiber can help keep your LDL cholesterol levels under control, and if you have LDL cholesterol levels that are too high, can help lower them. In some studies, as little as two ounces of apple per day (less than ½ of a medium-sized apple) have been found to be helpful. That amount means that you would only need to eat one medium-sized apple three days per week to fit into this same heart benefits category.

Flavonoids are a third reason to bring apples into your diet. You’ll get impressive amounts of flavonoids in the skins and pulp of apples – and these flavonoids have plenty of tricks up their sleeve for helping protect your heart health. They provide antioxidant protection; some help prevent excessive and unwanted inflammation; others help prevent too much clumping together of blood platelets; and still others help regulate blood pressure and overproduction of fat in your liver cells. Flavonoids have repeatedly been shown to help lower risk of heart disease, and also to improve problems with heart disease once it has occurred. So, once again, your Mom was right “An apple a day keeps the Doctor away”.

Have you received the pink slip? Or the golden handshake and been asked to retire early before you were ready? There are some very important decisions which you must make and they need to be made quickly.

When a jolt like this happens, we don’t always think clearly. Usually people are stunned that it happened to them and thinking about how they will go home and tell the family. The next thoughts go to their debts and regular payments but most people have no idea what to do about them. Sometime later you may actually sit down and think about your benefits, pension, retiring allowance and severance package. In light of the rest of your life.

Here are the steps you need to take and the order you need to take them.

Group Benefits

Your health and dental benefits will stop either in 30 days or 60 days of leaving the company depending upon the company‘s choice of plan. Priority number one is to consider whether there is any member of the family who is on regular medications for a medical condition. If you move to a Group Conversion plan within 30 days that condition will be covered and the benefits will continue. If you don’t act within that time, you and your family will all have to be underwritten for any plan you may apply for. This means that all prior conditions will not be covered. Many people don’t understand that medical and dental coverage is for conditions that you may have in the future. Once you’ve got a condition it’s not included and any medicine will not covered under the new plan.

The second part of your group benefits is your life insurance. When you leave the company that stops. If you think your family will have a hard time until you find another job, just think how hard it will be if the worry makes you sick or you should die and never be able to provide an income for them again. If you don’t believe that, please read my article about the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs on www.suesviews.ca. Act immediately and get some personal insurance on yourself. A very small part of your severance package will take care of that need for a few months.

The same applies if you had critical illness and disability coverage in your package. You may find yourself in a position where you take some temporary work or begin a new job and don’t have coverage for some period of time. A competent financial advisor should be able to get you coverage to tide you over. Call or email me for sound advice from 21 different companies.

Don’t forget that the travel insurance on your group plan will disappear too. So if you’re tempted to take a vacation while you’re off, make sure that you purchase coverage from a travel agent or your financial representative.

RRSP or Pension Benefits

This should never be used as a nest egg to live on or pay off debts for a number of very important reasons. First, if you spend it now, it can’t grow and be enough for when you do actually retire from the work force. It’s time that allows your money to grow. If it’s not invested, it will never grow. You would need to replace a lot more if you take it away. Consider that if you put $100 away and manage to earn 5% interest it will take 14.4 years to have $200. Read the last sentence five times and realize what it means for you. Any planner who recommends using it now just doesn’t’t understand how money grows.

Don’t be tempted to use this to purchase a business. Usually what happens is that most of the money gets spent on wages for yourself and that doesn’t allow you to leave money in the business to help it grow and become viable. It’s impossible to walk into a new business and expect to make a profit the first week. If you buy an already existing business the same is true because the “goodwill” is with the past owner. Unless you can afford to pay that person to stay around until they convince the customers and suppliers to trust and deal with you, there will be a period where you have to find new customers and suppliers to make the business as profitable as it was when you bought it. These processes can be expected to take 2 – 5 years before you can take a living wage. There’s no written rule that because the previous owner did well, you will. There’s a matter of elbow grease that’s needed in order to succeed.

Remember that some day you will really become too old to work and will need some money to live on. Although Canada Pension is there, more and more people are going to be taking out over the next 20 years than are putting in. That means that the pension received can’t increase to keep pace with inflation. Because everyone is entitled to it everyone will get a share; the more people, the smaller the share. We will all want to supplement our income from our savings in order to maintain a comfortable lifestyle.

Retiring Allowance and Severance Package

The actual use of this is to help you live until you find a new job. It is very important to spend wisely on things which you will need like eating, utilities and clothing. It’s not for vacations, home renovations or new vehicles. Again, if you need help in working through your budget or putting your money out of immediate use – taking it out of the bank account which you have a debit card on – make an appointment with your friendly financial planning insurance and investment advisor. That’s what they specialize in. Mortgages, loans and daily deposits are not part of their training but budgeting and wise use of money is their forte.

If you have no nest egg set aside and truly need to use that buy-out, sit down and create a bare bones budget. That means you look at each of the things which you spend money on and decide whether it’s a necessity or a want. For example, don’t justify having both a home phone and a cell phone because you “might” get a call for a job interview. Trust me, anyone who really wants to will leave you a message. Since you will have a bit of extra time, why not learn how to bake bread (no, you don’t need a $500 bread making machine), make your own deserts or learn to change the oil on your car yourself. This is a great time to learn a new skill or improve your expertise at something you enjoy doing. It might even open a new career door for you. If you can’t find a place to learn what you want, stat a group of people who are interested in the same thing and teach each other.

When you have the allowance / severance money put somewhere out of immediate reach, look again at your budget and decide how much you need for a week or two weeks at a time. Put that amount into your bank account and don’t take any more until your allotted period is up. Don’t cheat on yourself; you’ll always know that you’re not reliable. That’s a great way to sap your self-confidence and start the spiral into depression.

Debt Repayment

Next on your list must be contacting each and every one of your creditors; credit cards, mortgage and other lenders, utility companies, newspapers etc. You may be pleasantly surprised by what you find. Sometimes you will find that you have been paying for insurance which will cover payments until you get back to work. although that‘s not usually the case. Talk frankly with each one and tell them your situation. There is no shame in losing your job unless it was due to criminal activity. Most creditors realize that you will likely be on your feet again in a few months and will allow you to make reduced payments to stretch the debt out over a longer period. There is not always a charge for this as a lender would rather get their money back than have to take back your property and fire sale it. If the first person you talk to doesn’t seem helpful then ask for their superior and keep at it until you reach a person with sufficient authority to help you. Tell then what you are able to pay them each month and promise to update them every two or three months as needed. Then do it!

Put your credit cards in the back of a drawer immediately on arriving home. Don’t charge anything until you have enough money to pay for the credit. Only bring them out for real emergencies like medical treatment if your provincial health plan doesn’t cover your expenses.

The Most Important Thing

Remember that you must get up early every single day – seven days a week. Your new job is actually talking to people who might want to use your skills. They can’t see them over the phone or on the internet. Your second job is talking to people who might know of another person who needs skilled help. Your third job is to keep a positive attitude and realize that as long as you’re alive there is hope and things will get better. You do have marketable skills and there is someone waiting for you to come into their life. You are such a valuable person that you can make it through anything!

Many, many uses are being found for “a solution looking for a problem” which was invented in 1960, not even fifty years ago and it has changed many industries, not the least of which are data storage and medicine. Before we look at those uses, let’s learn a bit about the workings and history.

Light is just a group of particles called photons and electrons. A laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) is a device that emits light through a process called stimulated emission. That simply means that an electron moves (perturbs) a photon enough that the photon drops to a lower energy level resulting in the creation of another photon. Who knew that getting slower could double something other than your weight? The original photon is seemingly unchanged in the process and the second photon is created with the same characteristics as the original – it’s a clone. Laser light is usually emitted in a narrow beam, or can be converted into one with the help of lenses. Most other light sources emit incoherent light, which varies randomly with time and position. Think of a candle’s wavering light.

It’s actually Albert Einstein’s doing as he wrote a paper about coefficients in 1917 which described a process for laser and maser (amplifying microwave rather than infrared or visible radiation. In 1928 Rudolf Ladenburg proved the existence of stimulated emission and negative absorption. The first demonstration was performed by Willis Lamb and R. Retherford in 1947 and Nobelist Alfred Kestler proposed a method of optical pumping in 1950. Finally Theodore Maiman demonstrated a working Laser at Hughes Research Laboratories on May 16^th, 1960. Later in 1960 Ali Javan, William Bennett and Donald Herriot made the first gas laser using helium and neon. Working lasers are 49 years old this past week.

Since then, lasers have become a multi-billion dollar industry. By far the largest single application is in optical storage devices such as compact discs (1978) and DVD players, where a semiconductor laser less than a millimeter wide scans the surface of the disc. The second-largest use is fiber-optic communication. Where we commonly see it is in bar code readers (1974), laser printers (1982) and laser pointers.

Some other amazing offshoots include:

Medicine: Bloodless surgery, laser healing, surgical treatment, kidney and gall stone treatment, eye treatment, dentistry

Industry: Cutting, welding, material heat treatment, marking parts

Defence: Marking targets, guiding munitions, missile defence, electro-optical countermeasures as an alternative to radar

Research: Spectroscopy, laser ablation, laser annealing, laser scattering, laser interferometry, LIDAR, laser capture micro dissection

Commercial Products: laser printers, Cds, barcode scanners, thermometers, laser pointers, holograms, bubblegrams

Laser light shows

Skin Procedures: Acne treatment, cellulite reduction, hair removal

In 2004, there were approximately 131,000 lasers sold worldwide with a value of US$2.19 billion and another 733 million diode lasers on top of that were sold and valued at US$3.2 billion. Another amazing discovery in our world has taken us into the world of science fiction.

Important Reading If You have Any Money Concerns At All

A painless way to cut back on expenses – With the current economic uncertainty, many people are looking for ways to reduce expenses. A relatively painless way to reduce your monthly expenses is to have a second look at the way you’re managing your debt.

Over time, most of us take out a variety of loans for different purposes. These can include things like credit card debt, car loans, home renovation loans and, of course, the mortgage. And if you have more than one loan, you’re most likely paying a different interest rate on each loan. One of the easiest ways to reduce your monthly interest cost is to consolidate your debt at the lowest rate. Typically, your lowest-rate debt will be a loan that is secured by an asset, such as your home.

If you have sufficient equity built up in your home, consider switching to a product that allows you to access your equity, such as a home-equity line-of-credit. Then, use this line of credit to repay your higher-interest loans. In this way, you’ll be bringing all of your debts together into a single account, at a single rate. Some line-of-credit products even allow you to track debts separately within the account so you can continue to keep track of interest costs and repayment separately. Not only will debt-consolidation save you interest but it will make it easier for you to keep track of what you owe and how you’re progressing in paying it down.

Reducing your monthly expenses is one way to deal with economic uncertainty – and it doesn’t have to be painful. By borrowing smarter you can reduce your interest costs and increase your cash flow each month.

When most people think about retirement planning, they think of building a retirement nest-egg through RRSPs and pension plans. While these are key pieces of the puzzle, it’s important not to forget about another important element of retirement planning – debt elimination. After all, the less you spend on interest payments, the more you can allocate to your retirement savings.

A debt-elimination plan doesn’t have to be complicated. But you should have one or you’ll likely be in debt longer than you have to. There are a few simple strategies for getting out of debt sooner, such as:

Building extra debt payments into your budget.

Consolidating all of your debts at the lowest rate possible.

Using your income and savings to automatically reduce your debt (without giving up access to that money).

When you’re planning for retirement, don’t forget about the impact that your debt has on those plans. With a strategy for becoming debt-free sooner, you may even be able to retire earlier than expected.

As parents, we want nothing more than for our kids to succeed. Often, we wish to give our children a “leg up” in their transition to adulthood by helping them out with larger expenses, such as tuition for post-secondary education, a down payment on a home or even a reliable vehicle. If you find yourself in this situation, be sure to carefully consider where you take that money from so that helping your kids doesn’t hurt your retirement.

For people who don’t already have savings set aside for their kids, such as an RESP or a savings account, there are generally two options:

Retirement savings. Tapping into your retirement savings may be the quickest way to access cash but  it could have some undesirable consequences. For example, you’ll be charged taxes on a withdrawal from your RRSP and you’ll lose that contribution room forever. You’ll also forego any future growth on the amount you’ve withdrawn, which will most likely mean you’ll have less money available at retirement.

Home equity. Some people are reluctant to take on more debt in the years leading up to retirement. However, using a home equity line of credit to help out your kids may be the wiser choice in some instances. Here’s why: you won’t be charged any tax when you access your home equity and your existing retirement savings can remain intact and continue to grow. Some accounts will even allow you to track different portions of your debt separately. This can be particularly useful if you’re providing money to more than one child and/or if you wish to track the interest charged for different portions of the debt.

We all want to help our kids succeed. By carefully considering how you help, you can help to ensure you don’t compromise your own future financial security. Becoming a financial burden to your children will not be the kind of help you want.

I’d be happy to help you develop a debt-elimination strategy that complements your overall retirement savings strategy. Give me a call.