The host of television's Til Debt Do Us Part and best-selling author, Gail Vaz-Oxlade, comes to Vanier Hall February 9 to discuss the 10 Biggest Mistakes People Make With Personal Finances, presented by John Beverley & Associates and the Prince George Citizen.
"Ultimately this is an area where people are starved for information and they don't know who they can trust and they've come to understand they can trust me," said Vaz-Oxlade, who also hosts the new series, Princess. "My message is consistent and I tell everybody the same thing all the time. So they say 'OK, let's ask Gail what she thinks'."
There's a very simple reason why John Beverley, certified management accountant, wanted to bring Vaz-Oxlade to Prince George.
"Gail is well respected, as she is realistic and her directions are easy to follow," Beverley explained. "Budgeting doesn't have to be complicated. The money-jar concept really works because it is simple."
It is important to hear Gail's take on personal financial matters. By following her advice, she said you can reduce your debt load dramatically, increase your savings and get more from your hard-earned income.
The countdown to the biggest mistakes looks like this:
10. You haven't planned like a pessimist - you don't have insurance and you don't have an estate plan.
9. You don't know what you're investing in or how to do it.
8. You don't have an emergency fund.
7. You don't account for planned spending.
6. You're trying to keep up with the Jones.
5. You don't save enough.
4. You're spending money you haven't earned yet.
3. You don't know what you're making or how much you're spending.
2. You haven't learned to prioritize or how to make choices.
1. You have no system for tracking your money.
"And this is the one that blows my freakin' mind," said Vaz-Oxlade. "People bust their furry behinds to go out to work, in snow, rain, sleet - you name it - to make money and they won't even spend one hour a month managing it. You can just shoot me in my head right now."
When Vaz-Oxlade tells people about using a spending journal and then posting it to a cash-flow budget, she gets many reactions.
"People say things to me like, 'well, this is what you're good at, you like doing this stuff' and I go really? You think I like sitting down and posting my spending journal into my cash-flow budget every month? I frickin' hate it! It's a stupid job but it's like cleaning your toilet - you gotta do it."
Another irritating habit that irks Vaz-Oxlade is when people try to keep up with the Joneses.
"We find it so easy to delude ourselves," she said. "Let's say we move into a new neighbourhood and we look at all the cars and they're all late-model cars and now the car we've been driving quite happily for the last three or four years is looking like a piece. The car is still running just fine but we're just not keeping up with the Joneses. Or we go to our sister-in-laws and she's got a brand new refrigerator. Refrigerators seem to create a lot of envy. People walk into people's houses and they go all drooly over stainless steel refrigerators with lots of shelf space and then when we go home we open up our regular refrigerator and we look inside and say 'ew!' It's got nothing to do with the refrigerator. It's the same refrigerator we had when we left the house. It's all in our heads. So one of the things we have to recognize is about making choices. You choose to buy an expensive refrigerator and you choose to save less money. You choose to save money and not have the expensive refrigerator. You have to make a choice. You can't have it all at the same time."
She said credit cards are a tool that have allowed us to delude ourselves even further and to be aware of that downfall as well.
Vaz-Oxlade talks about her hosting duties of Til Debt Do Us Part, a show where she takes a tough-love approach to getting couples in financial crisis to face reality. With a combination of therapist and chief financial officer, Vaz-Oxlade asks hard questions and pushes couples to face each other and reality. Some couples are on the verge of bankruptcy, others just getting by and headed for disaster. Either way, they all learn how to work their way out of debt and get the skills they need to plan for their financial future.
"Very often what it boils down to is lack of knowledge or an unwillingness to face up to reality," said Vaz-Oxlade. "We had this one couple, he's a plumber and she was in a job with a significant income. They had one child, she was pregnant with another. The family was appalled they were having a second child so quickly, so nobody was even acknowledging that she was pregnant. He had a big truck and smoked and so to get my point across I lit up fake money and said 'really?' I did everything I could to get through to them. I made them make budgets, do all kinds of interesting challenges and I'm going there on the last day having just shaken my head and thought to myself 'OK, you're just too stupid for words and this is never going to work'. Nobody knows how much I am giving before I give out the cheque (up to $5,000 to get them on the right track.) But I have said to the office that we need a really nice 'Gail gift' to offset the pain that I'm about to inflict, so let's give her a really big baby basket."
The thing is, she said, they failed during all the challenges of balancing their budget, getting rid of the truck, having a plan for debt repayment. They had come up with nothing.
"I get there on the last day and they start to talk and they're bubbling," said Vaz-Oxlade. "They're showing me the bill of sale for the truck, and they show me their financial plan and I say, 'what the hell happened?'"
They told her they had a huge fight after the television host last left them and when they were finished fighting they had decided they wanted to fix it.
"And so they did everything I asked," said Vaz-Oxlade. "So they got the money and they got the big baby basket, too. So sometimes it's knowledge and a lack of wanting to deal with reality."
She said she's had other couples where it doesn't matter what she says to them, she can't get through to them and it's all played out in front of the camera.
"We don't shoot anything twice," she said. "If a train goes by I will do a pick-up line but every scene we do, we do it once. There is no script. So this is about people's reality and sometimes hurling them into their reality is really, really hard."
Tickets will be $29.99 for Citizen subscribers and $39.99 for Citizen non-subscribers.
Tickets are available at the Citizen office and online at www.ticketweb.ca.
