How can you grow your money?

How can you make money?

I suggest that you steal a page from the wealthy.

Business e-Volution, by Jacoline Loewen

The Spectrem Group found business owners account for 6% of seven-figure households — triple that of doctors and lawyers.

Don’t expect to get rich quick; the payoff comes when you sell. There is a great deal of that so-called sweat equity that is not seen or experienced by the average tax payer in Canada.

The median price for a web-design firm last year was $687,500, according to BizBuySell. I write about how to use the Internet to grow your business in my book, Business e-volution.

Construction firms tend to fetch $2.1 million. The bricks and mortor businesses still deliver a good return Not shabby amounts to add to your investment portfolio.

Two demographic trends to keep markets rising

Next week, I am running a breakfast session with our economics strategist and the topic is "Is it Getting Late?"

Jacoline Loewen

This long run is worrying many investors. As we all know, change is constant so what could keep the markets trending upwards?

Here are two demographic developments that I believe are likely to move the markets for decades:

1. Canada’s echo boom

As the ratio of a country’s middle-aged (35- to 49-year-olds) to young (20 to 34) rises, so do stocks, says Brookfield research.
Why? As people age, they start to save more for retirement, which is good for the markets. The Canadian and U.S. M/Y ratio surged in the ’80s, sank in the 2000s, but is expected to turn around next year, thanks to the aging of the millennials.

2. China’s baby boom

Beijing is easing its one-child policy, starting off by allowing parents who are only children themselves to have a second child.
“Think about what that means for demand for infant formula, food, education, and housing,” says David Winters, manager of the Wintergreen Fund.

What do you think? Continue the conversation on Twitter: jacolineloewen

The Wealthy Open Up About Managing Family Expectations

In Wealth Management, I have observed that families with $20M and over are wanting more than portfolio management. They are also wanting guidance in helping the family manage their fortune but alos their family cohesion. That has to come as the result of candid conversations that are, quite frankly, easier to avoid.


Jacoline Loewen

Those unspoken conversations do come back to haunt many and are really are better to have with a skilled facilitator aware of the many roadblocks and bear traps along the way. The following is an example of what can be achieved by tackling the task of the money conversations with family. Read full article here.

In one case, she helped a family patriarch who wanted to open up, by bringing the whole family together for a series of family communications workshops. “This was a dad, he wanted his children to know everything,” she says, but the family members weren’t on the same page. The business founder, his wife, their five kids, and his ex-wife, all came together. Two of the three kids work for the family business. The ex gets alimony funded from the business. Some of them talked “business”--while others felt like they were in the dark. “They were at odds; everybody was trying to find their place,” says Schnaubelt.

First, they identified communications styles and learned how to talk so the others would hear them. Those in the family manufacturing business practiced giving the other family members permission to talk, and the others practiced not letting themselves be pushed over. One outcome: they decided to set up a donor-advised fund at Fidelity Charitable, from which they could make large charitable donations in the family’s name, while each family member could suggest smaller grants from subaccounts. In another workshop, families sort through “Picture Your Legacy” cards to select values and aspirations, and then design a family crest. “It’s a great exercise to bring families together and talk about what’s important,” Markwalter says. Taking a page out of his firm’s playbook, he and his wife Juanita, gathered their five sons—two at home and the others scattered across the country—to give it a try. “I thought they’d think it was corny,” Markwalter says. “What I found was that they were incredibly opinionated in a good way.”

The Markwalters made up a family motto: “Faith, Family, Friends.” and added an actionable tagline: “Do the right thing.” They talked about ambition, and finding work that’s engaging—a work ethic they traced back to ancestors who worked as stone cutters on the Cologne cathedral (hence the stone cutter symbol on the crest). The biggest epiphany, Markwalter found, that he shares with other families hesitant about engaging in these kinds of talks, is that “every single family member has something to offer.”

Fintechs at the Future of Finance finals in New York

Jacoline Loewen with the team

IT was a warm week to be in New York with the team to pick the finallist for the Future of Finance Challenge. It has been a journey for all the Canadian companies so it was exciting to finally get to New York and meet the mentors and other finalists.

This is my big AHA: The UBS mentors learnt as much from their interaction with the Fintechs as the entrpreneurs learnt from their time speaking with the UBS experts.

What a great experience to go on the heroic journey with the Canadian fintech finalists, starting in Toronto and then travelling to the UBS HQ in the USA.
There were 11 finalists and 5 were Canadian which was amazing.

Rise of the Millenials - Jacoline Loewen, Speaker at Queens Business Entrepreneurs Association

Jacoline Loewen