Wealthy couples argue about money, too
By Julia McKinnell - Wednesday, December 12, 2012 - 0 Comments
More money means more chance for dysfunction, says author Deborah Price
photo illustration by sarah mackinnon
When couples fight about money, it isn’t always because they don’t have enough. In many cases, the more they have, the more dysfunction there is, says Deborah Price, a well-respected money coach and author of a new book for couples called The Heart of Money: A Couple’s Guide to Creating True Financial Intimacy.
“This book was written for anybody who’s interested in exploring and understanding their more emotional and behavioural issues toward money,” said Price, the California-based founder and CEO of the Money Coaching Institute. “Many of our clients are people who are very affluent. In fact, many are from multi-generational families of wealth.”
Price’s coaching work goes beyond financial advice to help people talk about what’s really going on. “For example, I have a client who is very talented and makes a good living, but who worries incessantly about money. He thinks he has money issues, but the truth is, he has enough money and makes a good living. His real problems are: one, he hates what he does for a living and feels trapped; two, he lacks the confidence and faith that he can choose to do something else; and three, he doesn’t believe that he deserves to have what he wants, which is the heart of his problem,” writes Price. Continue…
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Rich Kids of Instagram’s champagne posts and caviar hashtags
By Rosemary Counter - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 at 5:00 AM - 0 Comments
RKOI finds Instagram photos of youthful excess and posts them for the world to see
Instagram
A young woman, slender and stylish, holds three oversized designer purses. Three more sit at her feet. Pouting her lips, she snaps a self-portrait in the mirror. She then uploads it to Instagram—the ubiquitous online photo-sharing service recently acquired by Facebook—with the cheeky caption, “Can’t really decide which Birkin to use today.”
But among the 80 million Instagram users sharing the minutiae of their lives, there lurks an opportunistic voyeur. Since July, an anonymous blogger has been trolling the Instagram site and uploading copied images of lavish lifestyles to Rich Kids of Instagram (a.k.a. RKOI), a Tumblr sensation that has hooked online followers with its sly blend of envy and mockery.
“Anonymity feels good and is in our best interest,” the site’s incognito creator(s) write via the RKOI Gmail account. The Tumblr was born after some boozy online spying on the lives of the über-wealthy. “Everyone enjoys peering into a window of a world that’s not theirs,” (s)he writes. “Some love it, some hate it, but they keep coming back to it.”
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6 of Canada’s richest celebrities
By Blog of Lists - Thursday, August 23, 2012 at 3:17 PM - 0 Comments
For these superstars, fame has also meant incredible fortunes.
Source: Canadian Business
Have you ever wondered which cities have the most bars, smokers, absentee workers and people searching for love? What about how Canada compares to the world in terms of the size of its military, the size of our houses and the number of cars we own? The answers to all those questions, and many more, can be found in the first ever Maclean’s Book of Lists.Buy your copy of the Maclean’s Book of Lists at the newsstand or order online now.
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The Great White tax haven
By Jason Kirby - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 12 Comments
How Canada has quietly emerged as a go-to destination for the world’s ultra-rich
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Until last year, Peter was a successful American fund manager, with roughly 200 employees in New York City and a personal fortune of $100 million. That’s still the case today, save for one detail—Peter is no longer an American. In 2010, the U.S.-born executive took the extreme step of renouncing his American citizenship. “I wanted to remove myself from a society and country that was heading for a financial catastrophe,” Peter said in an email interview through his Toronto-based lawyer, David Lesperance, who specializes in “tax-efficient citizenship, residence and domicile solutions.” In other words, Lesperance moves rich people to places where they’ll pay less tax. So which global tax haven lured Peter (not his real name) away from Uncle Sam? Was it the Cayman Islands? Switzerland? Monaco?
Try Canada. A year and a half ago, Peter moved to Toronto and is well on his way to obtaining his Canadian citizenship. He bought a luxury home in the city, as well as a vacation property. And now he’s in the midst of determining how much of his fund management company to uproot from New York and move across the border. “Five years ago, I would not have considered expatriation as an option, especially to Canada,” he said. “I always thought of Canada as a younger sibling of the U.S.—the same, but less advanced in terms of culture, quality of life, business opportunities and above all, taxation. I now see it as the same, but maybe better in the long term.”
As for those taxes, Peter says he’s fed up with his money going to pay for what he considers needless trillion-dollar wars in the Middle East, and to cover the staggering interest charges America owes on the money it’s borrowed to live beyond its means; by the end of this decade, at least 18 cents out of every $1 of tax revenue America raises will go to interest payments. “I know I get more for my taxes in Canada,” he says. “And the debt levels here are reality-based.”
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The rich keep getting richer. Should we be worried?
By Erica Alini - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 5:41 PM - 132 Comments
Photograph by Flickr user seven_resist
That the gap between rich and poor has been widening in the U.S. and Britain is old news. What’s new, according to a recent OECD report (PDF), is that in the last 30 years the income gap has been growing even faster in unlikely places: Sweden, Denmark and Germany. Despite their notoriously generous welfare systems, the three have seen the split between top and bottom incomes grow faster than anywhere else in the OECD in the past decade. (Canada also registered a sizable increase in its Gini coefficient, the standard measure of income inequality.)
So why are the rich doing disproportionately better than everyone else? The report highlights an interesting trio of possible causes: Continue…
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Advice from the rich
By Chris Sorensen - Monday, December 6, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 3 Comments
Lessons in the way millionaires make (and sometimes lose) their money
Britt Erlanson/Getty Images
On an evening earlier this year, billionaire investor Michael Lee-Chin stood before an audience of elegantly dressed men and women inside an opulent 32,000-sq.-foot mansion in Oakville, Ont., an affluent town just west of Toronto. He had been invited by a developer to share investing tips with potential buyers in a luxury condo project on the sprawling $35-million Edgemere Estate, a clever way to attract the type of people able to spend up to $6.8 million for a single lakefront unit.
Though a contrarian investor (Lee-Chin doesn’t believe in broad-based, diversified holdings), many of his insights could have easily been applied to Canadians of any means—buy into a few high-quality businesses, understand what you own, and invest for the long run. But others were clearly aimed at the well-to-do crowd before him. “When you borrow from the bank, make sure you borrow enough money so when there’s a problem, the bank is worried, not you,” Lee-Chin said with a loopy grin. The audience, largely tanned and sipping wine, responded with hearty guffaws and knowing nods. He was only half-joking, mind you, having at age 32 convinced a bank manager to loan him $500,000, which he used to buy a stake in Mackenzie Financial that was eventually parlayed into a personal fortune.
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The lonely life of the watch widow
By Rebecca Eckler - Sunday, November 14, 2010 at 4:20 PM - 2 Comments
What is it with wealthy men’s strange obsession with haute timepieces?
Clive Brunskill/ Getty Images
Hockey widows now have company. Make room for the watch widow. On Oct. 28 at a luxury car dealership in Toronto, noted watch dealer Louis Kostopoulos, president of Louis Black, is hosting a very exclusive event for serious watch enthusiasts in honour of one of the world’s top haute horologists, François-Paul Journe. Kostopoulos describes the night as “an orgasmic event for the true watch lover.” Sixty men (and it’s only men) will sit down at an invite-only, security-guard-accompanied dinner with Journe to look at and talk about F.P. Journe watches, leaving a lot of wives at home shaking their heads.
Like most high-end watch enthusiasts and collectors, these men value their privacy. It makes sense. F.P. Journe’s watches sell for a minimum of $30,000, up to more than $650,000, and fewer than 900 are produced a year. It is the only company in the world to craft all their calibres (movements) in solid 18k gold.
“I’m definitely a watch widow,” moans one wealthy woman, who doesn’t want her name used. “My husband owns numerous watches and I just don’t get it. I used to talk about buying watches with him, but it just got completely out of hand. He would talk more about watches than anything else, including his job and our children. I was so painfully bored. So now I just leave it to him. Last week he came home with another watch and I pretended I didn’t even see it.”
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China's wealthy women
By Colin Campbell - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments
Yin, the owner of a paper recycling business, is the world’s richest woman
Mike Clarke/AFP/Getty Images
Zhang Yin is known in China as the Queen of Trash. The owner of Nine Dragons Paper, a recycling business, her fortune is estimated to be worth US$5.3 billion, up almost $1 billion from a year ago. That makes Yin, a 53-year-old former accountant, the richest self-made woman in the world, according to the Hurun Report, which ranks the wealthiest people in China.
Of the world’s richest women, the number two and three spots are also held by Chinese entrepreneurs. In fact, Chinese women dominate the list, holding 11 of the top 20 spots, with an average wealth of US$2.6 billion. Experts say Chinese women have found greater success in large part because they have fewer children and are less likely to stay at home. “There is no other country that comes even close to touching the number of self-made women in China,” notes the report.
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Europe's monarchies: scandal-ridden but such good fun
By Patricia Treble - Sunday, September 19, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments
In a continent full of grey politicians, royals may matter more than ever
Albert Niboer/DPA/Keystone Press Agency/ Jonas Ekstromer/ Mark Renders/Getty Images
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination, the playwright George Bernard Shaw once said. Well, on the face of it, the illusion is over for Europe’s monarchies, as scandals buffet the continent’s thrones. It’s been a rough patch. Two years ago, Luxembourg’s parliament effectively neutered the powers of its monarch, Grand Duke Henri, by stripping him of his right to block legislation after the deeply Catholic head of state refused to approve a bill that allowed euthanasia and assisted suicide. Then, last October, cash-strapped Belgians were infuriated to discover that their king, Albert II, had avoided paying sales tax on his new luxury yacht, because it is a “military vessel.” And in what the Telegraph called “the row that has turned the monarchy-loving public against the royals,” Crown Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands was raked over the coals by media for his plans to build a luxury villa, part of an exclusive resort, in the desperately poor African nation of Mozambique. He abandoned it only after the prime minister, too, was dragged into the mess. This year’s big contretemps however, came out of what is every monarchist’s dream event: a royal nuptial. On June 19, Crown Princess Victoria wed Daniel Westling in an heir-worthy wedding that culminated in a romantic royal barge ride to the palace in Stockholm, where they were met by a glittering array of royalty from Europe and abroad. The choreographed spectacle, though, was more than matched by the grumbling over the cost of the elaborate event—the government picked up half of the US$2.5-million tab. (The bride’s father, King Carl XVI Gustaf, paid the rest.) Continue…
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Super-sized philanthropy
By Jane Switzer - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 3:40 PM - 0 Comments
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett plan to give away half of their fortunes
Getty Images
How could giving away at least $115 billion to charity win anything but universal, flattering praise, especially in a post-recession age where many charities are in desperate need? Here’s how.
America’s two richest men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, plan to give away half of their fortunes (worth a combined US$90 billion), and last week announced they’ve convinced 38 other billionaires to do the same by signing what they’re calling the “Giving Pledge.” The list includes New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, media mogul Ted Turner, film director George Lucas and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
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Read like a billionaire
By Jason Kirby - Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments
J.P. Morgan’s summer reading list has come to be know as the billionaires’ book club
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When billionaire talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey affixes her coveted initial to the cover of a book, it’s a guarantee of huge sales. But what are the über-rich really reading? For that, consider J.P. Morgan’s summer reading list, which after 11 straight years has come to be known as the billionaires’ book club.
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The city of gold turns to dust
By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 10:59 AM - 15 Comments
Dubai is a financial mess. Who’s to blame for the collapse?
Only yesterday, it seems, Dubai was the glittering jewel of the United Arab Emirates, heralded as the first modern Arabian metropolis, a 21st-century socio-political model, globalization in action. Now the autocratic fiefdom that counts Barneys New York, the Travelodge chain, and a 20 per cent stake in Cirque du Soleil among its holdings boasts a new claim to fame: the most over-hyped, over-the-top asset bubble in history. This week, worldwide markets tumbled amid fresh fears of the global economic fallout from Dubai’s financial mess and the dawning realization that its finances are far more shadowy than ever imagined.Certainly the government’s annoucement two weeks ago that it couldn’t meet its debt repayments was carefully calculated: it chose the eve of the market-closing U.S. Thanksgiving holiday and the four-day holiday marking Islam’s Eid al-Adha feast to report it had asked creditors for a six-month standstill, and was scrambling to restructure US$26 billion of its total debt of US$59 billion. Then, it announced that debts carried by its tangled web of state-owned companies, among them holding company Dubai World and property developer Nakheel, might not have government backing. Global markets panicked when the UAE, a federation of seven emirates led by oil-rich Abu Dhabi, didn’t rush to bail out its second largest member. Some equilibrium was restored when the UAE set up a lending facility to ensure Dubai’s banks had sufficient capital, and after Abu Dhabi announced it will selectively “pick and choose when and where” to alleviate Dubai’s financial woes.
Those woes should come as a surprise to no one. Christopher Davidson, a fellow of the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Britain’s Durham University, predicted Dubai’s crash in his 2008 book Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success. “It’s amazing, really, the lack of due diligence done on Dubai in the last several years,” he says. Part of the problem, he notes, was Dubai’s confusing operating structure, which he says was deliberate. “The grey area between what belonged to the ruler, what belonged to government and what belongs to commercial entities served the ruling family extremely well: they could just cream off unknown amounts. Now the going gets tough and we have the ruling family and government washing their hands of these companies, making ludicrous statements that Dubai World is government-owned but doesn’t enjoy government guarantees.” Continue…
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Maclean's Interview: Arianne Cohen
By Lianne George - Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 21 Comments
‘Tall expert’ Arianne Cohen on why tall people are smarter, healthier, richer and more attractive—and why we always vote for them
When Brooklyn journalist Arianne Cohen was a five-foot-three eight-year-old, her classmates nicknamed her Amazon Ari. Her pediatrician told her she was going to be “taller than the president,” who at the time was not every little girl’s role model: a six-foot-one Ronald Reagan. Now 28, Cohen stands proudly at six foot three. Her new book The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life from on High is the definitive guide to the tall experience: the unexpected trials and benefits that come with height, and why tall people have higher salaries, IQs and life expectancies than the rest of us.Q: How do you define tall? I’m five seven. I thought I was tall.
A: Height is relative. Generally, you’re considered tall if you’re in the top 20 per cent, but functionally, if you’re towering over the people around you, you are tall.
Q: You say this is the book you always wanted to read growing up. What do you mean?
A: Height has really defined every aspect of my life, from which sports I participated in to who I dated to what I wore—because I couldn’t wear most clothes—to even what profession I ended up in. There’s been tons of research done on height and tall people but it was all tucked away in different corners of the world. I really wanted to create a bible for tall people—one book of foundational knowledge to really paint a picture of tall culture, because there really is a culture but it has never been written about.
