Ideally I think a financial planner is the person that provides the big picture, offers advices on multiple things covering all aspects of personal finances from budgeting, investment, tax planning, risk management (insurance), and estate planning (wills, power of attorneys, trusts, etc.). His role should be a point of contact for the client and he brings in other professionals (investment managers, accountant, lawyer, insurance brokers, etc.).

He ought to be on top of all aspects of tax and law changes and do an annual checkup of how everything is still on track with the big picture and keep in mind that he is doing this for the client, not for the other professionals. Investment managers want clients to invest this and that. The financial planner has the job of really making sure that that meets the big picture goals of the client. Insurance brokers may try to sell insurance policies that the clients don’t need and it is the financial planner’s job to make sure that it meets the big picture goals of the client.

If an insurance person is trying to sell more than what the client needs, the financial planner should stop him from doing so or get someone else.

Many years ago, I once dealt with the financial planning group of TD and I enjoyed it because he made the effort of going outside of TD products to find the one that suited me the most. He had since left TD because TD asked him to only sell TD mutual funds, TD insurance policies, and TD everything because he is an employee at TD. He knew that he would get more commission if he sold me the TD products but if he felt there was a better product out there (where it’s more cost effective, better managed, etc.), he would not hesitate to get them for me.

I don’t know how to compensate these professionals so that they will always focus on their clients. I think it has to come from the planner him/herself.

Cheers!

I was incredibly touched by your story.

Please discount the people who are judging your life based on a story that it must be incredibly difficult to share. And thank you for sharing it.

I’ve been in a similar place, financially, and was prepared to make the same choices.

My daughter, at the age of 18 months, had a tumour removed from her abdomen that was expected to be benign. In fact, it wasn’t. It was a very aggressive form of childhood cancer called neuroblastoma.

Within hours, our life was turned upside down, and we had to plan for the possibility of up to 18 months in weekly treatments, at a children’s hospital over 2 hours away. At that time, we were living, just like all our peers, on the edge of line-of-credit-purgatory, and had no emergency fund. We hadn’t planned for this.

It only took us hours to decide that we would choose to give up our home, our cars and all our possessions in order to look after our baby.

Now, critics might say that we had a poor financial plan, with no E-fund and too much debt and they’d be right.

They could laud us for the lucky coincidence of living in Canada, where hospital expenses are covered by universal health care — it really wasn’t anything we consciously chose.

They might also say that living that far away from a children’s hospital when you have young children is foolish. We could have saved a lot of travel expenses and time away from work if we’d only moved next to the hospital when our first child was born.

You’re a wonderful parent, to do your best for that little one and to go beyond what the local doctor thought was possible. I bet every hug and kiss is more than payment for your efforts, too.

I think paying for most of it while requiring that the student come up with part of the money is a good solution.

I hope if you have children you don’t let them leave the house or, if you do, that you don’t let them walk down the street, or, if you do, that you certainly don’t let them play sports. Do you understand the simplicity of THIS statement?

About the Vanilla Prepaid Credit Card, you wrote on October 19th that Vanilla MasterCard has an online form that can be filled out in order to use the card for online purchase. Could you give me more details, I could not find it. Has anyone been successful with online purchase where the seller ask for name and billing address (using Vanilla MasterCard)???

I am looking to use my Vanilla Prepaid MasterCard only for online buys (iTunes, Skype, eBooks). I would really appreciate your help here… Thanks!

Steve

I also use The Grocery Game to identify “rock bottom” sales, and to match coupons to sale items. I can usually save about 40%+ on individual items, and 25% or so off my total grocery bill.