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Category: TFSA
TFSA The Tax-Free Savings Account – How does it work? Where can I invest? How much can I invest? Tax-Free Saving Account Question FAQ – Canadian Federal Government – Incentive – The TFSA – Strategy – Website – Information – Ideas – Concept. Tax Free Savings – Government MONEY.
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Generate New Sales: Mark Borkowski
Its your call: How to generate new sales prospects.
Humor me for a second. Think back to the last deal you closed and ask you, “Who was the decision maker I had to reach and influence? How did I do it?”
The reason I asked you to think about that is because there will always be someone you will need to contact and influence to get the next deal and the one after that and all the deals you could ever possibly close in one lifetime. Your success doesn’t just happen. You make it happen, and it all begins with prospecting.
Prospecting is nothing more than the art of speaking with people who might do business with you, and engaging them in a meaningful conversation so that they will want to see you and talk further. Let’s not make it any more complicated than that. At the end of the day a telephone sales call is only a conversation between two people.
Make a list of everyone you just identified. It doesn’t matter if you need to speak with fifty people or only one; your focus is on precision not volume.
Once you have the names write down the main issues facing each person on that list. The reason I’m suggesting that is because you will have to address their issues, not yours.
If you start your conversation rambling on about your products and services you will sound like you’re selling something. When you talk about their issues you hit their Greed Glands which address what’s in it for them. Retirees are not waking up in the morning wanting financial products. (It would be nice.) They are, on the other hand, concerned about the rising cost of living.
Once you’ve worked out what you want to say you will have to get the person on the phone. The objective of your call list is not about making calls. Many financial advisors base their lists on volume, in other words the more names on the list the better because if they don’t contact someone there are plenty more to call. What happens with this approach is that most people end up leaving a lot of money on the table, missing up to 75% of their opportunities, simply by not contacting people. A call is not a commodity. It’s precious.
It would be nice if we were mind readers and knew where our biggest opportunity was, but we don’t so we have to speak with everyone. Your objective is to book appointments.
So whether you have twenty people to call or only one, get them on the phone. All of them. Without exemption.
Leaving a voice message doesn’t count. That only fools you into thinking you contacted someone when in fact all you did was leave a voice message. The easiest way is to ensure that you connect with your prospects is to simply find out when they are in, and then call at that time.
By planning your calls and your message you stay in control.
Once you get your prospect on the phone you will have the opportunity to speak for all of about thirty seconds at which time you will either ask for an appointment or ask a qualifying question. From the time you introduce yourself to the time you ask for an appointment there are less actually than thirty words. Make each word count. The words you speak paint images in people’s minds and you have complete control over what those words are.
Twice as important as what you say will be how you say it. Speak slowly and send the message that what you have to say is important. It’s so important that you will take a minute before the call to focus on how you can make the prospect’s life better, and that will bring out the passion in your voice.
At the end of each call you will either be sitting there with an appointment or you won’t. Either way self-assess to either see what you did well so that you can do it again on the next call, or look at where you need to improve.
If a call does not work out for whatever reason figures out if it was they or you. If there was something you could have done better, make sure to take correction action for the next call and then reward yourself for learning from your mistakes. When you consistently self-assess you stop repeating the same mistakes, and when that happens your performance benchmarks rise as like gravity.
By making yourself more effective you ensure that your next deal will be more successful than your last.
Mark Borkowski – is president of Mercantile Mergers & Acquisitions Corporation. Mercantile is a mid market M&A brokerage firm based in Toronto. Contact: www.mercantilemergersacquisitions.com
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Financial advertising, marketing and sales without the 56% google inefficiency.
Google admits that advertisers wasted their money on more than half of internet ads
By http://qz.com/author/zwenerflignerqz/
Online advertising is a fickle thing. It accounts for 20% of the ad industry’s total spending, and over 90% of revenue for the internet giants Google and Facebook. That said, no one seems to have any idea whether it actually works.
That uncertainty reached a new high this week, as Google announced that 56.1% of ads served on the internet are never even “in view”—defined as being on screen for one second or more. That’s a huge number of “impressions” that cost money for advertisers, but are as pointless as a television playing to an empty room.
This is not a big revelation. The web metrics company ComScore reported last year that 46% of online ads are never seen. Spider.io, an ad fraud company acquired by Google in February, has pointed out that a large portion of ads are “viewed” only by robots, revealing that one botnet of 120,000 virus-infected computers viewed ads billions of times, running up the tab for advertisers without offering them the human eyeballs they sought.
Still, the acknowledgement by a heavyweight such as Google that ad viewability is a problem could shake up the industry by delaying possible IPOs of ad companies and requiring new ways for advertisers to gauge the effectiveness of their ads.
The nineteenth-century retailer John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.” In this case, it’s the obviously the half that pays for ads which are never seen, and now advertisers are looking for new tools to figure out which those are.
It’s worth noting that Google made this acknowledgement of the deficiency of the model it has profited richly from while also offering a new model to advertisers: In July it introduced its Active View product, which measures only viewed ads.
www.gicrates.ca GICRates.ca Official Site:Best Rate Around
GIC Rates : the online destination place for the best rate around. Guaranteed Investment Certificates. The Canadian GIC Market is worth over 730 billion and is a money maker for top banks. A recent study shows that the average account is worth over $60,000.00 and the majority of assets are with big banks at low rates. The review in Money Magazine explains that most people are getting burned when they turn to the safety portion of what should be a balanced portfolio. GIC is the bread and butter of the major banks in Canada.
This will all change by perception and over time. The highest rates paid are from some of the smallest companies, trusts, credit unions, caisse populaires and near banks. Few people know this and fewer people take advantage of it and stick to the big banks and pad their pockets and lessen their own.
It’s perception and decepti0n; how long will it be until there is an even playing field and a more efficient marketplace. Those that need to step up, monitor and manage this metamorphosis are still sleeping at the switch. The independent deposit broker will change the way things happen just like the mortgage broker used to be the lender of last resort and now is the go to facilitator.
GIC rates will become more and more competitive when the banks realize they are losing market share with the same old low rates when new and secure institutions will give out better rates for more and better business. The public will lose millions in lost interest in the meantime as the banks have no interest in marketing this GIC Industry Secret.
MONEY Tip: Use a registered deposit broker and get the best rate around for a personal or business investment account.
Best Rate Around – Tax-Free Savings Account
A great and smart idea that needs better marketing. This simple concept of Best Rate Around is unique in concept and may be a cute play on words; but it really means business, big business, big enough that the big banks make a tidy some off each and every year. Now something new Tax-Free Savings Accounts another way to get your money.
Most Canadian financial institutions including banks, trust companies, insurance companies and other financial organizations including small business corporations. What are they? how do they work? who sells them? what is eligible? and how can I create a self-directed Tax-Free Savings Account and invest in alternative vehicles and methods.
Lets take a good, smart and hard look at the product, the plans and the services along with the usual suspects before we determine (Tax-Free Savings Accounts) are good and underlying investments and strategies may be suspect.
Over time the hype will settle and it may be benefits under-marketed and less used. Tax-Free Savings Accounts are a good, smart way to save money tax-free by investing in any number of ways. Paying less tax and investing for the future in this manner create an excellent long term strategy to save and invest. Learning that usual line-up of complex investment components are available from the most likely merchants makes it slightly less interesting.
What is new, exciting and still to come is the concept of self-directed Tax-Free Savings Account and a day where small business and big business collide as some small Canadian corporations take advantage for all the right reasons. Small Business – Crowd Funding – and Self-Funding are just some of the new ways of investing in these newest of registered plans.
Best Rate Around dedicates itself to finding the lowest mortgage rates and high deposit rates; without chasing companies, businesses and institution realize the online investment marketplace and good products, great service and tremendous saving becomes evident to consumers and product manufacturers.
The Mortgage Killer – NPA and the big banks Secrets Revealed
NPA a bargaining chip with big banks that helps a great number of average Canadians in many ways.
By:Jaoquin Benitez – Learn more tips, tricks and techniques that make, save or preserve more of your money.
www.themortgagekiller.ca
Perhaps you will be shocked to find out the banks’ worst kept secret, or perhaps it is something that you already knew, but never recognized as a valuable piece of information.
Lending institutions protect themselves by securing the loan with the property that they are financing. This gives the moneylender some assurance that the property owner will pay back the borrowed money on time as specified in the original mortgage agreement and as long as you keep making your mortgage payments, everybody lives happily ever after.
However, if the homeowner begins to fall behind on mortgage payments, the dream of owning a home could become your worst nightmare, not only for you but also for the lending institution.
What is the secret that the bank does not want you to know? The bank does not want to take away your home! I know it sounds absurd, but by the time you finish reading this article you will be persuaded that it is an accurate statement. Allow me to go a step further; the very last thing that the bank wants to do is foreclose on your property. It will become an extra expense that they don’t need to incur and it will cost them thousands of dollars to take a property through the foreclosure process. Now you may be asking yourself: If that’s true, why are they threatening me with foreclosing my property? What do they really want?
There is a simple answer: the bank collection agent wants to scare you into making up the late mortgage payments, and by doing so, ensure you will continue to make your payments on a regular basis until the end of the term as specified in the mortgage agreement. The threat of foreclosure is the only tool that the bank has at its disposal to persuade you to make the mortgage payments.
Furthermore, once the bank initiates the foreclosure process, the laws regulating the banking industry require them to report that property as a non-performing asset. Doing this will hinder the bank’s capacity to borrow more money and will affect its overall credit rating. The bank must try to avoid having to report a non-performing asset on its books at all cost. In many cases, banks intentionally delay initiating a foreclosure proceeding for up to six months, and sometimes even up to a full year, to avoid reporting the property as a non-performing asset.
The ‘non-performing asset’ problem or the NPA, as it is commonly known in the banking and financial industry, affects the banks in more ways than you and I may care to know. These three simple letters strike terror in the banking sector and business circles. The dreaded NPA rule simply states that: “When interest on a loan or any other monies is due to a bank and it remains unpaid for more than 90 days, the entire bank loan automatically becomes a non-performing asset.” They will go to great lengths to avoid having to report a property as a non-performing asset.
Why would three simple letters, “NPA,” cause such terror to a financial institution?
There are a number of problems that will arise from having too many NPAs on the bank’s books. The biggest problem is that the bank must have a certain amount of dollars in cash reserves. If their levels of non-performing assets become too high, they will have to put more cash into their reserve account to compensate for these non-performing assets. This means they now have less money to lend. In addition, they now have to deal with a house that they don’t want because it will become a money pit. Furthermore, they will not be able to make a profit on it because of the way mortgages are structured.
In their quest to maximize their profits, banks structure mortgages in a way that they are paid the majority of the interest up front or at the beginning of the loan term. This is called a front-loaded mortgage, and most mortgages are structured in the same way. This means that in the early years of your mortgage you have not built much equity in the house because the majority of your mortgage payment was slotted to pay for the interest on the loan.
Often banks find that their asset (your house) is worth less than what they lent out, and once the bank takes ownership of your property, they not only have an administrative and legal nightmare, but they are about to take a financial bath!
Even though I am not a bank advocate, I am certain that if you were in the bank’s situation, you would be forced to do the exact same thing. The bank does not have any other recourse. The only legal recourse available to them is foreclosure in order to try to minimize some of their losses. However, that is their very last option.
Can you see the predicament that lending institutions find themselves in? On the one hand, they are losing money by not receiving your mortgage payment and on the other hand, they can’t really afford to foreclose on you because of the negative consequences this will bring them.
While this is an admittedly simplified explanation of how financial institutions operate, the bottom line is that banks are in the “money buying and selling business.” To put it in clear and simple terms, the bank’s profit is generated by the spread created between the interest rate that they pay you on your money and the interest rates that they charge on the money that they lend out. The bank pockets the difference. For the bank to make any money, it must lend out the funds in its possession, or find some sort of investment vehicle that will guarantee a rate of return greater than its cost of borrowing.
Consider the main motivating factor for a bank to be in business. It is not to provide a service to the general public; they are in business to make money. In a foreclosure case, they will most likely lose money. As the old saying goes, “the best way to make money is to stop losing money.” Having the knowledge of how lending institutions operate is empowering. Since you now know that lenders don’t want to foreclose on your property — and you don’t want them to foreclose on you — you have common ground to work out an agreement that will stop the foreclosure process and satisfy both of your needs. Remember: The bank does not want to foreclose your property.
What You Need to Know About Your TFSA
The New Year is quickly approaching and this means that it’s time to start planning your savings for 2013. Do you know how much you can afford to save in the New Year or how much you want to save in 2013? A general rule of thumb is for people to save 10% to 25% of their net monthly income; however this of course this depends on several different factors such as your debt repayment obligations, your total family income as well as your total monthly expenses.
If you are planning to save a percentage of your income you should definitely consider investing in a Tax Free Savings Account. In 2009 the Canadian government introduced the TFSA as a way to encourage Canadians to save money every year.
The TFSA is an investment account that is offered by full service brokerage firms, discount brokers and banks to all Canadians who are over the age of 18 years old. As of 2009 Canadians can invest $5000 per year; therefore if you have never contributed into a TFSA you can currently (as of 2012) invest up to $20,000 (4 years x $5000 per year). The TFSA contribution limit is increasing to $5500 per year in 2013.
How to contribute into your TFSA
– $105 per week
– $211 biweekly
– $458 monthly
The investment options in a TFSA are similar to other investment accounts – they include cash, guaranteed investment certificates, mutual funds, exchange traded funds and stocks. All interest, dividends and capital gains earned on investments within a TFSA are completely tax free. This means that you do not receive a tax deduction when you contribute money into a TFSA, but you also have no tax consequences when you withdraw money. TFSA investments do not necessarily have to be used for retirement and your savings can be withdrawn at any time. We will discuss TFSA investment strategies over the upcoming weeks, so be sure to keep reading for more TFSA tips.
Current TFSA Interest Rates on Cash Deposits (as of December 18, 2012)
- CIBC – Bonus Interest on all new TFSA contributions
- ING Direct – Double your TFSA interest as of January 2013
- Scotiabank – 2% on all TFSA contributions
- Bank of Montreal – 1.15%
- RBC Royal Bank – 1.15% on all TFSA cash contributions
- TD Canada Trust – 1.05% on all TFSA savings deposits