Do you know where your life jacket is?

Well our ship is starting to pick up speed and steam out of the harbour. It is time to step outside onto the main deck to take a breath of the fresh, crisp sea air and see what you can see.

The first thing to be noticed is that the crew is busy rushing around battening the hatches. When asked about all the activity, the crew member says there is a chance that we may be encountering a bit of rough water, nothing to worry about.

Lets take look at the bigger picture and see how the Canadian ship doing as a whole? According to Stats Canada,

“91% of Canadians will not be able to retire at age 65”.

That is an astonishing number which seems very high to me. Especially when you consider that over the past 30 years (until recently) we have had one of best performing periods for the stock market and best performing periods for the bond market.

Also, governments have, for the most part, continued to spend more than they bring in as revenue which, while increasing the debt, helps to stimulate the economy.

That 91% statistic is not intuitively what I would expect. It would seem that something isn’t quite right here, something just does not seem to add up???

Among other things, it begs the question, where are Canadians (and people around the world for that matter) getting their information from: government, the banks, Wall Street, TV, the school system?

It is my belief that there are key financial building blocks that people will need to know in order to successfully avoid the major financial storm that is coming. From where I stand, very few people are talking about what those building blocks are.

After another deep breathe of that fresh sea air and it is evident that the ship is starting to pick up speed and is steaming straight for deeper waters.

Just as a check, do you know where your life jacket is?