I remember a time when I realize that I’d stopped laughing. I love to laugh. And a smile comes pretty quickly to my lips. But my life had gone into the dumper and I’d just stopped smiling. When I realized how much I missed the feelings that came with smiling and laughing, I put myself on a remedial program.

Did you know that babies start smiling in their sleep the moment they get here. No, it’s not gas. It’s a smile. And they smile while awake as early as four weeks. Hey, if a baby can do it, you can do it too.

Forcing yourself to smile can boost your mood. Psychologists have found that when you use the muscles in your face that are used in a smile, your spirits will lift. And smiling is good for your physical health too. It boosts your immunity because your body is more relaxed when you smile. And when you smile, there is a measurable reduction in your blood pressure.

Yup, the minute you smile, your body begins to release endorphins. And since it is easier to smile than it is to frown – it’s been reported that it takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown – you can get that great rush with less effort than it takes to scowl at the guy who cut in front of you in line.

I started visiting funny sites, watching comedians on YouTube, and listening to humorous stories. And it worked. Just a few minutes a day devoted to finding my funny and I got back in touch with my inside hahaha. Smiling became easier and easier.

Make an effort to smile today at work. Statistically, we tend to smile less at work than at home, but you can up the number of times you smile just be shifting your attitude.  Since smiles are contagious, you would be doing your bit to spread the good feelings around where they are likely most needed. And you could end up getting a promotion since smiles make people seem more attractive, confident and sociable… the very things that are likely to get you noticed at work. You’ll definitely be thought of as more beautiful. In one study, 69% of people found women who were smiling more attractive than when they were wearing make-up. That’s because the muscles we use to smile lift the face, making a person appear younger. So skip the botox and smile.

Ever “heard” a smile while on the telephone? Smiling is transmittable in so many ways, and is so worthwhile. In one Swedish study, people had difficulty frowning when they looked at other people who were smiling; their beams turn on automatically.

As Mother Teresa said, “Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.”

How many times have you smiled today?

Y’know the cable package and digital recorder that you pay for every month without a second thought. That’s you thinking about the cable bill as “spent” money. With one call you could cut your costs substantially and slam $50 or more a month against your mortgage or into your retirement savings.

You see the money you blow on your smart phone as “sunk” money; by the time you get the bill you’ve already spent the money. Never mind that a call to pick a better plan that gives you more for less money, or a switch to a pay-as-you-go plan, could save you hundreds of dollars a year.

Switching banks is too much trouble. Golly, just think of all the auto-debits you’d have to change. (Lazy!) Switching telephone providers is a major pain in the butt, even though you could reduce your long-distances charges significantly. Switching from buying new to buying used as just plain yucky. (Oh, get over it!)

If you’re whining about not being able the find the extra money to make a dent in your debt, if you’re concerned that you’re not saving enough for the future, if you wish you had an emergency fund so you could sleep at night, it’s time to look to your sunk costs.

Today, pick an expense you’ve been paying for a while – be it your gym membership, your book-of-the-month-club subscription, your car or home insurance – and look for ways to trim your costs. It is amazing how quickly small expenses start to erode savings potential simply because you’ve gotten used to spending the money. And it’s equally amazing how much you will accumulate in savings when you start small, consistently moving a little money away for the future. It’s not about giving up all the good stuff. It’s about becoming conscious about how you’re spending your money, and making sure you’re also saving enough so you can have a nice life later when it comes time to hang up your tool belt.

I still remember the first time I “acknowledged” my one-year old and the almost immediate payoff.

My daughter had been playing with something she should not have had. Her grandmother took it away rather abruptly, leaving her angry and crying. I pulled her up onto my lap and said, “So you’re pretty angry at the way Nanny took that away from you.” She cried and nodded slowly. “Sometimes you don’t understand why you can have one thing and not another, right?” Again she nodded, but this time she made eye-contact with me. She knew I understood. “It can be very frustrating not knowing what all the rules are, particularly when someone gets angry at you for breaking a rule you didn’t know.” I could see the light in her eyes shining with relief. By acknowledging how she was feeling, we ended what could have been an “episode.”

Perhaps the thing salespeople and parents grapple with the most is the tendency of their audience – be it a demanding customer or a petulant child – to NOT want to do the very thing we need them to do. They may have a very good reason, or they may be basing their refusal to cooperate on something they just don’t understand.

In the world of sales, “objections” fall into one of two categories:

real objections – yes, the printer is rather slow when it’s producing full-colour photographs or the play-date is rather short because mommy has a doctor’s appointment this afternoon.

misconception – something your child thinks that isn’t exactly so.

There are ways to handle each of these objections, but that’s a blog for another day.

Why?

Well, young people like being carefree about their money. After years of being broke, having some change means buying all the stuff they had to defer while they were poor students. Or maybe, because they are poor students, there’s a sense that debt is inevitable. Sure seems that way for parents. And you know what they say, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Hmmm.

That’s you they’re talking about there Ms. Apple. It seems you’re destined to walk in your father’s footsteps, to make all the mistakes your parents made with their money, to end up just like ‘em. How are you feeling about them apples?

Or you could do it differently.

But that would mean figuring out what to do.

And that would mean being conscious about how you deal with your money, instead of letting it slip through your fingers like so many mommies and daddies did.

You can climb on the consumer bandwagon and, like your parents, put style before substance. You can ignore common sense and shop using credit like there is no tomorrow. Hey, you can do anything you want.

Including…

• Deciding that life is to be lived, not to be spent paying for stuff that keeps you on track with the If-you-don’t-have-it-you’re-not-cool crowd.
• Choosing to use money to make dreams into reality instead of buying more crap.
• Opting for awareness instead of blindly following the path of the latest (and soon to be forgotten) trend-setter.

You can choose the  path your parents took, consuming yourself to debt. Or you can carve your own path.

It’s your life. You decide.

When David Chilton wrote The Wealthy Barber in 1989, millions of North Americans bought it. The messages were clear and simple. The strongest: “Save ten percent.” We all nodded and sighed. Yes, indeed, we should be saving.  And once upon a time we did. But even David is disheartened by how little we’re saving and how much debt we’re piling up, driving him to write The Wealthy Barber Returns.

Canadians had the reputation of being good savers. Between 1973 and 1993 we saved 10% or more, with our savings rate reaching a peak of 18.5% in 1982. In 1993, four years after David started preaching about how important it is to “pay yourself first”, we began our great slide. By 1999 we’d hit an all-time low of 3.6%. But we weren’t done slipping yet. In 2003, the average Canadian saved just 1.4% of his pay. And in April of 2007, the personal savings rate came in at NEGATIVE 1.3%.

Why?

That’s the big question. Why would we just stop saving? What happened to make us think that we didn’t have to put away some money for the future?

In Boom Bust and Echo, David Foot asserted that, “When you are young, you are a borrower. In your 40s and 50s, you are trying to build a nest egg for retirement.” Yet since 1993 as we watched the first of the baby boomers turn the corner to middle age, the savings rate plummeted despite a healthy economy, low inflation and more being written about the importance of saving. Today there are more people going into retirement with debt than ever before. Not just mortgage debt, which is bad enough. But stupid consumer debt because boomers, ljke everyone else just can stop scratching their consumption itch.

Okay, so what we know we should do and what we actually do are totally different things. Whether you want to blame higher taxes, easy consumer credit, a booming housing market or job losses, the reality is that we are not saving what we should.

What’s the solution?

Perhaps if we each took the time to figure out what are life will actually look like if we try to live on the pittance we’d receive if we have no money of our own it might jolt us into reality. And perhaps if, for just one month, we forced ourselves to live on the much smaller income we are dooming ourselves to because we don’t save, it would be the wake up call we’d need to start squirrelling a little sumthin’ sumthin’ away while we still can.

There’s a big difference between being poor and being broke.

People who are poor don’t have the resources available to improve their financial situations. They may face a personal challenge, such as a learning or physical disability. It may be because they became ill or disabled, and unable to work they must rely on meager benefits. It may be because life has kicked them hard and they haven’t found their way back to their feet: divorce can do it; widowhood can do it; unemployment can do it.

Being broke, on the other hand, means you have resources available to you and you can improve your financial situation, you just may not know how. It may be that you’re financially illiterate. It may be that you have no will power, no ability to defer gratification, no time management skills. Or you may simply be LAAAAZY!

The only solution to being poor is to find a way to make more money. If there’s no way to make more money, then poor you will remain, and you must figure out how to make the best of the scant amount of money you do have. I’m sorry if your life feels like it sucks. However, I do believe that you have control over how you deal with your day-to-day experiences and that your perception of your life can change if you change the way you think.

Poor means you must focus on finding ways to stretch your dollars. Never mind trying to save; forgedaboutit. Your goal is to make do and make a life. You’ll shop second-hand, find fun on the cheap, and live simply. You’ll know you can’t have all the stuff the not-poor people have, and you’ll make peace with your circumstances so you aren’t bitter and miserable.

The solution to being broke is to get your head out of the sand and fix the mess you made. If debt is your problem, look around this website or get a copy of Debt-Free Forever and work through the process. If it’s savings you lack – no emergency fund, no curveball account, no long-term savings – figure out how to trim back on what you’re spending so you can come up with the money to save. Get your hands on a copy of Never Too Late and you’ll see that with as little as a dollar a day you’ll move from being Not a Saver to being a Saver.

Your circumstances do not define you. You can achieve anything you put your mind to. At the very least, you have control over how you see your life and what you make of what you see.

You: I should get my RRSP money in as soon as I can.

You: Ah, but I’m really not sure where to put the money.

You: Doesn’t matter just get it in.

You: But I kinda hafta decide what I’m gonna buy before I open up the RRSP. Will it be a mutual fund, or a GIC or a segregated fund, or will I buy the index?

You: If you wait to decide, you’ll never put the money in the account.

You: Yah, but I can’t decide, so I’m going to wait.

Could it be that the reason we don’t save is because with so many choices on how to invest we’re stymied. Yes it could.

Sheena S. Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark R. Lepper of Stanford University have found in their research that people are less likely to make a decision when they face too many options.

They set up sampling booths at a grocery store offering some customers 6 choices of jam and other customers 24 jars of jam. While only 40% of passersby stopped at the booth featuring 6 different types of jam, 30% actually bought the product. The larger display drew more tasters: 60%. But here’s the kicker: only 3% actually bought the product.

It seems that having too much choice seems hampers our ability to make the decision on what to buy.

Hey, if you can’t decide what you should buy with your RRSP dollars, you can always go with a Savings Account option to get the money in before the deadline. Once that decision is out of the way you can then focus on what you’ll invest those dollars in to make them grow.

In choosing your investments for your RRSP make sure:

1. You know what you’re buying

2. You’re staying true to your investment personality (your ability to handle risk)

3. You stay in line with your investment time horizon.

Gail says: The risk with any variable portion is that as interest rates start to rise, your mortgage interest rate will go up. If you’re not paying close attention, it may go up before you even notice.

The normal variation between a variable rate mortgage and a fixed rate mortgage is about 2 points. I don’t have a problem with split mortgages overall if they are working in your favour. But as with everything else financial, whether a particular strategy will work depends on the situation at the time and what you need.

There is one theory of mortgage management that says if you go with the three year rate consistently, you’ll win on rate. I’ve never tested it.

Georgina wrote: My husband and I have been living in Canada for three years now. We haven’t bought a home yet, but we hope that we will in about two or three years. When I finish my education I will have a higher income. Currently I am making 23k and my husband is making 55k. We have a savings account, each of us has a TFSA and RRSP accounts, and we are saving toward a down payment for a house. However, I am not sure if we should put the saved money (for the down payment) into the RRSP accounts only instead of putting it into savings. How should we optimize our savings?
Gail says: Welcome to Canada! And congrats on taking it slowly so you can do the home-buying thing right. As for how to save for your downpayment, using the RSP Home Buyer’s Plan may work very well for you.

I think using the HBP is a good idea, given your limited resources. Make sure that you put whatever you get back in taxes (if you do) to good use building up your savings for things like closing costs on your home purchase.

Jackie wrote: Will reducing my credit limit on my credit card affect my credit score or have any financial implications on me? I used to have a $20,000 limit, and I’m hoping to get that down to $5,000 at the MOST. Having that much available credit didn’t do me any favours!

Gail says: Reducing your credit limit will affect your score if you’re constantly bumping up against the limit. The rule of thumb to keep a shiny credit score is to not go any higher than 50-60% of your limit. Of course, if you’re paying your balance off in full, and you’re not credit seeking, you can say screw the credit score and just do what’s good for you. You’re right about having access to credit creating the potential for debt! If you’re likely to fall to temptation, lower your limits.

The climate of Iran is perfect for growing fruits we consider “exotic” in North America. Persians not only eat their fruit fresh – fresh fruit and veggie dishes are standard sides at most meals – they incorporate fruit into their savory dishes.

I’ve always been a huge fan of mixing savory with sweet. And, of late, I’ve come upon several “national” dishes that incorporate nuts. (You’ll see nuts again when I share my recipe for South African Bobootie.)

From dates to pomegranates, oranges to peaches, quince to prunes, Persian cuisine is so willing to add the sweet to the savory that the sky’s the limit when it comes to creating interesting flavours. Add their love of cinnamon and citrus, oh the places you’ll go.

GAIL’S PERSIAN CHICKEN

• 1 bottle pomegranate juice (or the juice of a pomegranate)
• 1 large red onion chopped up
• 2 tbs butter
• black pepper?to taste
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 2 cups walnuts toasted and chopped up finely
• 1/2 cup tomato sauce
• 1 1/2 cups chicken stock
• 3 large limes juiced
• 1 tbs molasses
• I chicken in pieces

Season chicken with black pepper. Fry the chicken in butter until golden brown. Set aside the chicken.

In the same butter, fry the onions slowly until transparent (about 10 mins).

Add the cinnamon and stir for 1 min. Add the walnuts and stir for 1 min. Add the tomato sauce, lime juice and molasses.

Add the pomegranate juice. Then add the chicken stock.

Add the chicken (and any of the juices it has produced) and let simmer until cooked (30 mins or so.)

I served it with couscous (with wild mushrooms and raisins), but it would also be good with rice, mashed potatoes and/or crusty bread for sopping up the yummy sauce. (Traditional Persian cuisine typically always includes a rice dish.)

Hint: If you double the recipe, don’t double the cinnamon.

Do you know what you’re spending every month?  If you don’t know where your money is going, how can you ever hope to know what you may be over-spending on?

Unconscious spending is at the crux of the problem for most people who see their circumstances change even slightly. Lost a few hours a week at work? Where will you trim? Decided the time’s right to have a baby? What will you cut back on in your spending while you’re on maternity leave? Just broken your leg, twisted your back or come down with something that’s gonna take more than a few days to heal? How will you cover your costs when your income slows to a trickle?

If you want to be able to cope with life’s little surprises you have to first know exactly where your money is going. Sure, you may have a big emergency fund, but you may need it to last a long time, so that’s no excuse for being complacent.

Giving up the delusion of “there will always be more money” is the fist step I make people take in my book Debt-Free Forever. Before I lead readers through the process of making a budget, I insist that they do a spending analysis. I’ve had more than a few complaints about how much work it is, how hard it is, how boring it is. Kwitcherbitchin. It is the much over-looked first step. And the knowledge you’ll gain about how you spend your money is worth every minute of the work you’ll have to do.

Don’t even know where to start? Grab your last month’s bank statement(s), credit card statement(s), and line of credit statement(s). Now, break every transaction into one of the following categories:

• shelter (mortgage, rent, hydro, heat, taxes, maintenance)
• services (cable, telephone, security, home-cleaning, cell, internet, childcare, health, pets)
• food (everything you put in your mouth and swallow, including restaurants)
• Shopping (any STUFF you bought for yourself and anyone else — EVERYTHING)
• transportation (car payment, gas, repairs, highway tolls, taxis, bus, train)
• entertainment (movies, books, magazines, hobbies, gym, club, sports)
• bank fees (service charges, ATM fees, NSF fees, DON’T INCLUDE INTEREST)
• interest costs (from everywhere)
• debt repayment (don’t worry about splitting out interest and principal, just add all your debt repayment amounts together)
• savings

In the best of all worlds, you’ll do this for six months’ worth of your paperwork. Why? Well, a half-year is just about enough time to catch all the things that only pop up periodically. Less than six months will give you some insight, but not clearest picture.

Now add it all up. Are you surprised at the places your money has been going? Which categories brought the biggest surprises? For the couples I work with, it is the small purchases made regularly, which add up to big money, that bring the wide eyes and gasps. They never imagined that their $10-a-day habit actually added up to so much money.

Once you know where your money is going, you’re in a much better position to decide how you want to spend it. While it’s all very well and good to say you only plan to spend $400 a month to feed your family of 6, if you’ve been spending two or three times that, your $400 budgeted amount may be nothing more than wishful thinking. When you end up going over, you’ll blame the budget with a song like this: “See, budgets don’t work.”

It wasn’t the budget that didn’t work. It was you. Yup, your unwillingness to do the work to see where the money actually goes meant you were just grabbing numbers out of the air when you came up with that budget, instead of working from a place of knowledge and purpose.

The last time the Dragon showed up twelve years ago it brought the Y2K crisis, and once again we are faced with dire warnings of apocalypse. This time it’s the Mayan calendar and predictions of world end. Not according to the Dragon!

According to the Chinese astrology, both 2012 and 2013 are lucky, wise years. Lucky Dragon comes first, followed by wise Snake. This follows 2011’s year of the Rabbit, a year in which we could calms our nerves, focus on home and family, and practice diplomacy.

So where do you want to focus in the Year of the Dragon? On your own higher consciousness. On eliminating negativity. On removing limitations. How can any of those be bad things?

Are there things you want to achieve this year? Have you written down your goals? Are you working to a plan? While the Dragon is lucky, counting on luck without hard work is lay-zee!

Dragon years are traditionally filled with Pageantry. The last time the Water Dragon showed up in 1952 Elizabeth became queen of England, Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap opened and the U.S. introduced the H bomb. Big, big, big. Think Summer Olympics. Think World Expo. Think landing of the Mars Science Lab.

Dragons are unpredictable, so don’t thing everything will be smooth sailing. But Chinese Dragons, unlike western dragons, are benevolent creatures. They offer you the chance to reach for the brass ring, to dream, and to make your dreams come true. Spring is particularly important to the Dragon, so what you put in motion in this spring will carry you through the year.

Lest you think Lucky is all in the mind, let me point you to a stody done by a Professor Richard Wiseman at Britain’s University of Hertfordshire who studied lucky people for ten years. He found that folks who feel lucky do differ from those who do not, but not because of some outside force. It turns out that “lucky” people pay more attention to their surroundings, are more extroverted and open-minded and are optimist. Since the soul of “luck” is opportunity, the more opportunity you encounter, and the more willing you are to see that opportunity, the luckier you will be.

Will you make your own luck? Will you be satisfied with your life or will you focus on what’s missing? Will you use the dragon’s wings to progress beyond where you are now?

It’s hard to be positive about your life if your debt is keeping you up at night. And you’re always anticipating disaster – the collection call, the bouncing cheque, the end of the money before the end of the month – the stress can feel like an elephant on your back. I make Princesses face up to how their behaviour is working against them. I insist that we move from delusional to rational. And the ones that do reap the additional benefit of developing a sense of peace.

So are there things that keep you awake at night? Do you cringe just thinking about what needs to be done?

Time to make a Crap List. Who in your life is making you crazy? What activities are you doing that you’re resenting every moment you’re doing them? What are you denying because the idea of facing up is just too much to even consider?  And if you have anything that finishes the sentence, “I wish I didn’t…” add that or those to the bottom of your list.

If you procrastinate and hate where it gets you, which is always behind the eight ball, write it on your list. If you’re disorganized and hate the fact that you’re always wasting time looking for your crap, add that to your list. If you’re a Cronic Late Arriver and you hate being late, add that to the list. If you have a Master of the Universe complex and think you can control everyone and everything around you, and end up pissing people off and feeling totally underappreciated, add that to your list.

Okay, there’s your list of Crap; you’re half way home. Now you have to figure out what you’re going to do differently to eliminate these stressors from your life.

Is there something on your list that’s an energy drain? If so, how can you eliminate it? Yah, I’m talking about your overdraft protection, your constant running to the ATM and racking up fees, your lack of a meal plan that has you wasting feed every week.

Are there people in your life who are toxic? What can you do to minimize or eliminate your exposure to these people? If you have an idiot for a boss, a moron for a partner, a badly behaved child, what are you going to DO about it?

Always rushing from one errand or commitment to the next? How will you create some time to just relax and think?

Are you making the time to reflect and count your blessings? Sometimes folks get so busy trying to meet demands, fix problems, deal with issues, that they forget to look at what is good in their lives. Take the time to say thank you for what’s good in your life, and for the lessons your challenges are teaching you, and your stress will go way down.

You know Make Do Month: It’s the month when you stretch everything a little farther so you spend a lot less. You’ll scoop the last drop out of every bottle or jar. You’ll dig to the back of your food cupboard to use up the noodles, the soup, the bag of beans. And you’ll go through your freezer and eat everything that’s been sitting there for the past six months. (Hey, don’t let a little freezer burn scare you off. Turn it into soup!)

January is also a good month to experiment with a new routine as you make do. Used to buying coffee every day as you head to work? Start brewing your own at home or work and save big-time. Go out for lunch? Pack one from home four out of every five days and you’ll be able to pay off that holiday debt.

If you have family or friends whose birthday falls in January, committing to Make Do Month mean you won’t rush out and buy a present. Instead, you’ll find a way to give something of yourself instead of something you’ve bought. Make their favorite cookies, offer to cook them a meal or a bunch of meals for the freezer for those extra busy workdays, or create a coupon for three nights of free babysitting. Maybe you’re a computer genius and can offer to do maintenance or repairs. Perhaps you’re a mechanic and can offer a tune-up. Substitute your energy for spending money.

While you’re being frugal and using up all your stuff so you don’t have to spend money in January, why not inventory the things you seem to have a lot of: screws, magazines, nail polish, face creams, shampoo, books, yarn, scrapbooking supplies. Measuring your abundance and committing to buying nothing more until you’ve used up what you have is a great way to take Make Do Month and make it a year-long way to save money.

After the buzz of the holidays you’ll no doubt be happy to stay home for the first couple of weeks. Then you may start feeling itchy. You’ve got to get out. You can feel the walls closing in. Before you hit that great new restaurant that just opened up or head out to the clubs, remember that January is Make Do Month. Call up a couple of friends and throw a pot-luck dinner instead. My girlfriend Annie asked all her invitees to bring a dish from their cultural heritage. I showed up with Oxtail Soup (stay tuned for a new recipe) and partook of everything from cabbage rolls to Lebanese.

January is a great month to start a tradition of once a month game or poker nights and rotate from one friend’s home to another. No one says you can’t have fun in Make Do Month. You just can’t spend gobs of money.

Make Do Month is a conscious decision to stretch every dollar as far as it’ll go. Try it and see if just becoming conscious saves you money. I’ll bet you’re pleasantly surprised.

Parents, meet Sales Training. Sales Training, let me introduce you to the Parents.

If you’re scratching your head it may be because you don’t know a “close” from an “objection.” Relax. Most of the skills and techniques taught in the most effective sales training programs are easy to learn and have application across a wide range of life’s challenges, including communicating with children.

Whether you’re trying to sell photocopiers or phones, granola bars or a full serving of veggies, communication is the key to getting your message across and gaining the other guy’s acceptance. Hey, that’s exactly what you have to do when you’re trying to get your kids to taste something new, wear the outfit you want them to wear or attend the family get-together without whining or tears.  It’s all about communication. Be convincing and you’ll make just about everything you have to do with your kids ten times easier.

The single biggest skill in communication is what is often referred to as “Active Listening.” It’s the process by which you hear what a person says and then play it back to them for clarification.

When you’re selling to a customer it’s important to listen carefully to what they say, since everything holds a clue to what that customer really wants. If we take the same approach with kids, the results are amazing. Since, fundamentally, we all want to be “heard” and kids often feel that they are “not heard,” using active listening skills with them shows them you’re really paying attention. In it’s simplest form it goes something like this:

“Pat pushed me and I fell down and then I scraped my knee and when I started to cry Pat laughed at me and that made me so mad and I got up and pushed Pat down.”

“I’m sorry you got so upset. So let me get this straight, Pat pushed, you got hurt and angry and so you pushed Pat back?”

“Yeah.”

While some people interpret active listening as a regurgitation of what the other person said, leaving the whole communication flat and processed, real active listen requires much more. You must give your child your complete focus, maintaining eye contact, nodding, and asking questions to clarify what the child is saying. Ultimately, it must feel as if you are the only two people in the world while you’re communicating, particularly when emotions run high. You’ll know you’re doing it right because your child will want to keep talking because you’re doing such a good job of listening.

There are good reasons for women’s sense of financial insecurity. One factor that affects women’s income is their family status. Women make up the large majority of lone parents. Women head up 80% of all one-parent families and single-parent households headed by women have by far the lowest incomes of all. According to  the Canadian Research Institute for the advancement of Women, “51.6% of lone parent families headed by women are poor.” It’s no wonder we fear for our children and ourselves. The statistics are frightening. And if you are one of the statistics, your whole life can be frightening. What could be worse for any mother than wondering how she will put food in front of her children, keep them housed and provide for their well being?

Divorce treats women and men very differently. According to the Vanier Institute of the Family, in the first year after divorce, women’s household income plummets between 20-40%. Three years after divorce, women’s income remains far below what they had during marriage and far below their ex-husbands’ incomes. According to the Canadian Women’s Foundation, 21% of single-parent mothers are poor, compared to 7% of single parent fathers.

The most frightening statistic of all is the fact that approximately 30% of all support orders are in default nationally. And some of those support orders are a joke! I had one mom say to me with tears in her eyes, “How could they say my child is only worth $50 a month?” So, not only do women have to face the full emotional responsibility of raising their children, they often receive little, if any, consistent financial support from their children’s fathers. It’s no wonder women are scared.

Not only do women have less money to deal with the challenges and crises that arise, they are also more likely than men to encounter these challenges. Our longer life expectancies put us in the position of having to cope for more years on less money and it also makes us more vulnerable to disabilities, since physical deterioration increases with age. Thirteen percent of Canadian women and 42% of women 65 and older had disabilities.  And the unemployment rate among women with disabilities is 75%.

Disability in later years puts more pressure on financial resources. At a younger age, a disability can completely wipe us out because it eliminates or severely hampers our ability to earn an income. Even here, men and women play on different fields. Of all disabled men and women with an income, while men’s average income was $26,890, women’s average income was only $17,230.

As a woman, do you worry about your financial security? Do you think things are different for men and women? What are you doing to ease your fears?