Cheer up and live within your means.
That was the message David Chilton conveyed to his audience at last week’s third annual Regional Business Symposium in Morinville.
In a more sombre note between humourous anecdotes of his work life, the popular author and Dragon’s Den personality warned that people lose money because they think too much about “stuff” rather than the future.
“We are now in a society that thinks if they don’t have granite countertops they are losers,” he said.
“How screwed up for a society is that? That is horrible.”
Chilton said the developed world has been on a debt binge for almost 60 years. While Canada is bound to experience new growth it should prepare to deal with a renewed credit crisis as well as other economic challenges.
If the United States falls into another recession and China’s economy slows, it will also hurt Canadian commodity prices, he said. And if Canada wants to remain a leader in international financial markets it has to tackle provincial debt and grow its economy first.
But the biggest debt issue is personal debt, he said.
“In the past 20 years the government and individuals have borrowed almost exclusively for consumption,” Chilton said.
“People spend money on acquiring things rather than setting money aside for education or their retirement and instead they spend it on furnishing their homes … and that is very troubling when you look at our demographics.”
Low interest rates help people keep their personal debt payments low and provide them with large spending power, he said. But interest rates will not stay that way forever and many people don’t consider that they have to pay back the principal amount one day, he said.
If he could deliver one message to people, he said it would be to cheer up. People have lost perspective of what is important and complain too much about trivial things instead of focusing on what is really important.
“The average person in this room lives a better way of life than the richest person in the world 50 years ago,” he said. “Yet people don’t notice it.”
Chilton said that things are in fact less expensive or only slightly more costly now compared to the past.
The costs of university education and home prices have gone up since the 1940s but houses are also twice as big, he said. And the health-care system now allows people to live twice as long.
“We are the lucky ones and these are the good old days,” he said.
“If you are a Canadian and you are healthy it doesn’t get any better than right here and now.”
The annual business symposium was organized by four municipalities – Morinville, Sturgeon County, Bon Accord and Gibbons – and saw about 400 attendees. The goal of this year’s event was to provide information and expertise to help attendees further the success of their own businesses.
Chilton’s keynote address was only part of a full day of networking, sessions and panels on motivation, education and collaboration in the business world. He runs a financial planning business and publishing company and is best known for his personal finance books The Wealthy Barber and The Wealthy Barber Returns.
