As the Quans can attest, piloting a luxury RV these days is about as far from puttering around in a stodgy old motorhome as dinner at El Bulli is from a burger at McDonald’s. The vehicles of choice for today’s well-heeled kings of the road cost from $300,000 to $2 million. Many of these RVs are designed to pull “toy haulers” behind them—trailers with his-and-her motorcycles, golf carts, even small cars. And the real show stopper? “Slideouts,” says Jim Palmer, CEO of CoachShare of Encinitas, Calif. “You just push a button and the sides of the RV glide out smoothly on electric slides, expanding the interior of the living room, kitchen and bedrooms.”

As over the top as these luxurious RVs may be, they can be surprisingly affordable thanks to a new concept known as fractional ownership. A group of people agree to rotate the use of the RV while sharing expenses such as depreciation, maintenance, storage and insurance. After three to five years, the RV is sold and the proceeds are distributed to the fractional owners.

“We were about to buy an RV two years ago,” says Tai, “but after watching a TV special on fractional RV ownership, my wife and I decided this was a better way for us to go. RVs depreciate quickly and we couldn’t use one much throughout the year because we’re not retired.”

At the moment, only two companies, both of them in the U.S., offer fractional RV ownership. CoachShare offers a flyand-drive program that lets you fly to an airport in the U.S. and pick up your RV there, but it limits your RV travels to inside the U.S. On the other hand, Carefree RV of Houston will deliver the RV to your doorstep in Canada and you’re free to travel in both Canada and the U.S.

The Quans paid CoachShare $36,000 (U.S.) for a one-eighth share in a $350,000 Monaco Diplomat 40 PDQ. Their package entitles them to use the coach for five weeks annually for three years. The Quans can then sell their share back to CoachShare—for about 40% of their initial investment, if projections pan out—or renew for another three-year term. “Before we bought our RV, we took about four family vacations a year to places like Florida and Hawaii at $10,000 or so each,” says Tai. “I have to say that luxury coach travel has been as good as some of those trips.”

The companies that arrange the fractional RV deals also store, clean, repair and maintain the RVs. They even include basic training. “When you simply rent an RV,” says Brian Tucker, president of Carefree RV, “most places just hand you the keys and say ‘good luck, and have a good time.’ We try to empower people so that they feel confident driving it.”

Ron Eisenberg, 66, of San Francisco, says most of his fears about driving a big rig vanished after he took the day-long driver’s training program offered by CoachShare. “My wife Jodi drove our RV, too, and we had about 60 feet behind us because we were also towing our car,” says Eisenberg. “You wouldn’t want to drive your RV in downtown L.A. but through most cities it was just fine.”

Tai Quan says the training program was one of the major selling points for his family. “They took us through all the mechanicals,” he says. “How to flush the toilet, how to drain the tank, stuff like that.” When the Quans had a circuit breaker cut out during their trip to the Grand Canyon, help was just a click away. “We had our computer with us and Monaco, the company that built our coach, has online support,” says Tai. “They walked us through the process of how to reset the breaker and we fixed it ourselves in no time.”

You should talk to a lawyer before signing any fractional ownership deal. Be sure to check out the company that is arranging the deal. Ensure that creditors can’t put a lien on your portion of the RV if the firm gets into financial trouble.

The Quans say they’re delighted with their fractional RV. Last year they spent their weeks in California, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon and Las Vegas. “This year we’re thinking of including Colorado and Idaho on our trip as well,” says Tai Quan. “We can’t wait to get rolling again.”

Actually, no. In Canada, almost anyone can afford to run. If you decide to enter the race when the next election is called, your run for glory will likely cost you less than the price of a used car.

Most of your out-of-pocket expenses will come before the actual election, when you’re trying to land the nomination from a major party, says Garth Turner, the Liberal member of Parliament for Halton, Ont. “Once you get the nomination, you can basically use other people’s money to finance your campaign,” he says. “But getting the nomination will cost you between $5,000 and $20,000. For a desirable riding, you have no idea if you’ll get it or not — and you never get that money back.”

Before you’re a party’s official candidate, you can’t issue tax receipts, so no one will donate money to your campaign “unless they love you, like maybe your mother,” says Turner. But once you’ve hooked up with a major party, you can turn to your local riding association, which usually has a fundraising machine in place. And you only have to raise a modest amount because there are strict limits on what you can spend.

The limit varies from riding to riding, but on average you can’t spend more than about $80,000 once the election has been called. Established politicians in winnable ridings usually spend the maximum, but if you’re a Green Party candidate in a riding that always votes Conservative, you’ll likely spend much less. Elections Canada says the average amount a candidate spent in the 2004 election was $26,000. If you look only at the candidates running for a major party, the average shoots up to about $40,000.

Chances are that most of your election expenses won’t have to come out of your pocket. Elections Canada will reimburse candidates for 60% of their eligible election expenses, as long as they get at least 10% of the vote.

Libby Davies, the NDP member of Parliament for Vancouver East, says that when it comes to fundraising, belonging to a major party helps, but the party doesn’t actually send you cash. She funds her campaigns with small donations from regular folks. The rules limit donations to $1,100 per person; corporations, lobby groups and unions are no longer allowed to donate at all.

Turner says if things don’t go your way, a run for office could end up costing you thousands, but for him the risk was worth it. “If you’re thinking of buying something frivolous, like a yacht or a Mercedes, you might want to consider trading that for an experience that very few Canadians will ever have, which is to sit in the federal Parliament of Canada,” he says. “It’s an experience that you’ll never forget.”

“I just cut them off and politely say, ‘Can you hold on for a second?’ And then I leave the phone sitting there and finish making my dinner,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve ever had someone who was still there when I came back.”

Jenvey doesn’t want to be rude, but consumers’ war against telemarketers is escalating, and the conflict is not always pretty. Thanks to computerized dialers, cheap long distance rates and massive high-tech call centres, we’re getting more and more calls from slicker and slicker salespeople. An Environics survey shows that households with incomes of $80,000 or more receive an average of five bothersome sales calls a week, and if you’re unlucky enough to appear on a “hot prospects” list, you can get that many a day.

Most civilized countries have dealt with the problem by establishing government-run do-not-call lists. You just have to register once on the list and no telemarketers are allowed to bother you for years. The U.S. has such a list and 76% of American adults have already signed up. The U.K. has one, Australia just got one and even India is planning to roll one out by the end of the year.

In Canada, we’re out of luck, although we were supposed to have a list years ago. The lobby groups have watered the proposal down (political parties, charities, pollsters and even newspapers are now exempt) and the legislation has been passed, but the CRTC, which is overseeing the project, seems to be having trouble getting it up and running. Their latest estimate is that it will launch in early 2008 — if we’re lucky.

In the meantime, how can you deal with one of modern life’s most annoying interruptions? Try these techniques, and soon you’ll be enjoying your dinner in peace.

The other do-not-call list

Most Canadians don’t know about it, but the industry group that represents telemarketers and their brethren has quietly launched its own do-not-call list. You can sign up quickly and easily at the Canadian Marketing Association website by clicking on the Do Not Contact Service button on the right-hand side. The service is free and the CMA says that six weeks after you join up, you should see an 80% reduction in telemarketing calls and junk mail. Not all telemarketers belong to the group, though, so you’ll still get some calls.

Know your rights

You have legislated rights when dealing with telemarketers, though they’ll never let on that you do. When a telemarketer calls, tell him to put you on his company’s do-not-call list. By law, he has to stop the patter and do it right away. He even has to give you a confirmation number as evidence that your request has been processed.

If he ignores your request, you can complain to your phone company or the CRTC. If necessary, the CRTC can hit the telemarketer where it hurts, and suspend their phone service.

Zap ‘em

The TeleZapper is a little device that you can hook up to your phone line to reduce telemarketing calls. It works by mimicking the same three-note tone that the phone company uses to tell callers that a line is out of service. That tone tells the computerized autodialers used by telemarketers to remove your number from their master list. “We noticed almost right away when we hooked it up that the number of calls went down,” Jenvey says. “I would recommend it.”

Get your own spiel

Marjorie Jones receives up to four telemarketing calls a day, but the Ottawa librarian dispatches them effortlessly with her own telephone script. “I just say, ‘Thank-you for calling, but I don’t make purchases over the phone,’ and then I hang up,” she says. “Sometimes they’re still talking when I do.” She delivers her message calmly and coolly, and her blood pressure never rises. “It doesn’t bother me. I know some people get stressed out, but really, you should get a grip.”

What’s your line?

We asked for your top tips on dealing with annoying telemarketers:

“Tell them you’re on your cell phone and their call is costing you money. They’ll usually apologize and hang up.”

“Some phones allow you to hook up your call display to the TV, so when someone calls, the number flashes up. That way you can screen your calls without even getting up.”

“I just say ‘Thanks for calling, but I’m busy right now. Can I have your home phone number so I can call back when you’re having dinner?’”

Download the Counterscript. It’s a telephone script for consumers that will soon have you grilling the telemarketer on what brand of toothpaste she uses.

Both Brad, 36, and Michelle, 34, say they love being parents. When I look over at Finleigh, who is holding her index finger up to her lips and shushing us for making too much noise, it’s easy to see why. She’s busy setting up a make-believe tea party.

So why not have another Finleigh, another Ruarie? Michelle says the problem is money. It’s not so much the cost of the diapers and formula as the loss of income. Michelle quit her job to work from home so she could look after her two young daughters, and that decision has meant a big pay cut. Add in the mortgage, saving up for the kids’ education and paying down their own debts, and Brad and Michelle’s finances are being stretched to the snapping point. They would like to have a third child, but they’ll probably be forced to stop at two.

Brad and Michelle aren’t the only young parents who are finding that they can’t afford to have as many children as they would like. Across the country millions of other young parents are reaching similar conclusions. Without much in the way of comment or debate, Canada has become a country where small families are the norm — and those small families are shaping a demographic crisis that is going to hurt all of us over the decades ahead, whether we have children or not.

To understand why, consider the amazing shrinkage of the Canadian family. As recently as the 1960s, families used to span an average of four kids; today, the typical family includes a mere 1.5 children. Since today’s parents aren’t having enough kids to replace themselves, Canada’s population growth has slowed to only 1% a year. Two-thirds of that meagre increase comes from immigration rather than new babies. Soon we will rely completely on immigration to keep Canada’s population from shrinking.

Slow growth is a problem because many of our social programs — notably Old Age Security and Medicare — were designed back in the days of tail-finned cars and four kids to a family. Both plans raise money by taxing those who are working. But since Canada’s population is aging, fewer and fewer people are working for each retired senior. Right now there are five working people for every senior; within 25 years, there will be only half that many. Given the dismal math, the federal government will face two ugly options in the decades ahead. It can reduce benefits or service to the elderly or it can tax the young even more heavily to support the millions of grey-haired boomers now beginning to slide into retirement. “If you expect to get all of those nice government payouts when you retire, you better hope that people have lots of kids,” says Malcolm Hamilton, an actuary with Mercer Human Resource Consulting in Toronto. “Because if the next generation is too small, you’re going to be outta luck.”

The tug of war between the generations has already begun. Over the past three decades, governments have consistently funded and enriched programs for seniors. Meanwhile, young families are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. As a result, they’re reducing their number of kids — which has the effect of ensuring the problem will grow even worse in years to come.

You can’t blame young couples for their decision to have fewer children than their own parents. Over the past three decades, total family incomes in real terms — that is, adjusted for inflation — have actually gone down. Statistics Canada says the median family income in 1980 was $58,000. Twenty-seven years later, it’s $57,700. (Both figures are expressed in 2005 dollars to remove the effects of inflation.) But stagnant incomes are not the worst problem. A generation ago, it took just one working parent to generate that median household income. These days it takes two.

As a result, child-rearing has become a monumental financial challenge. In the early 1970s, when 70% of families had only a single income earner, raising kids was demanding, but the only financial penalty you paid was the actual cost of raising each child. Today, both parents work in 70% of families. When they decide to have a child, they pay a double penalty. They pay the extra expenses of raising each child. They also pay with a huge drop in income since one parent has to take time off work.

Young families are facing a much bigger challenge in making ends meet than earlier generations, says Hamilton, one of Canada’s top experts on pensions and aging. He calculates that after expenses, many working families don’t have much more to spend on themselves than senior couples on welfare. That’s an appalling finding. But instead of helping young families, Ottawa taxes them to death. Why? “Because they look rich, even though they don’t have any discretionary income,” Hamilton says.

The financial illusion persists because the income tax system looks only at what you make, not the demands that you face. According to 2003 Statistics Canada data, the average total income for couples with children is about $87,000; the total income for a senior couple is about $50,000. Since young couples have higher incomes, they pay two-and-a-half times as much tax as senior couples.

The problem with this system is that young couples also have many more fingers reaching into their wallets than seniors do. While seniors have paid off their homes and raised their kids, the young still have to contend with mortgage payments, car payments, diapers, and university tuition for their kids. As a result, the average middle class family with kids has only 4% of the household’s gross income left over each year, compared to 13% for senior couples.

If you agree that people should be taxed according to their ability to pay, the current system is brutally unfair because it focuses on income, not wealth. In 2005 the median net worth of couples with children was a meagre $189,000. The median net worth of senior couples was more than twice as high, at $443,600. Look at those figures and you have to think that if anyone needs tax breaks, it’s not people in their 70s, it’s people with seven-year-olds. But the system works in just the opposite fashion.

The tragedy is that young parents still want good-sized families. Demographers at Statistics Canada noticed a few years ago that when they asked Canadians how many kids they would like to have, the average number was 2.5 — in other words, one full child more than they actually go on to have. Why the discrepancy? It seems that young couples adjust their plans when they run into the economic realities of having a child.

Hamilton believes our national priorities have gone askew. “It’s not a matter of charity, of giving people money to raise kids,” he says. “It’s a matter of letting young couples keep more of the money they’ve earned, because their children are a future asset. The question is: should we view children as just another family expenditure, like a car, or as something that benefits all of society?”

Brad and Michelle can tell you all about the trade-offs involved in having a child. Before Finleigh was born they both worked full time. They enjoyed foreign holidays and went out with friends three times a week. But when Finleigh arrived, Michelle’s pay plummeted to less than half of her previous wage. The standard one-year maternity benefit in Canada is 55% of your pay, but it’s capped at just under $22,000, so most middle-class parents don’t even get the full 55% income replacement.

When her maternity leave was up, Michelle could have put Finleigh in daycare and gone back to her corporate job, but daycare would have cost $15,000 a year. Brad and Michelle crunched the numbers and decided that if Michelle worked for herself from home while looking after Finleigh, they would be better off. So she set up a home office in their musty basement and took on freelance communications projects, working whenever Finleigh napped. The arrangement worked fine — until Ruarie arrived on the scene.

Since Michelle was self-employed, she wasn’t eligible for maternity benefits. She couldn’t work with a newborn on her lap, so for a while, her income largely vanished. Brad and Michelle now had to support two young children on a combined income that was close to half of its pre-child total.

They tried to cut costs, but found that some costs can’t be cut. Like many young families, they had bought their starter home just before their first child was born. While both were bringing home paycheques, the mortgage consumed a reasonable 25% of their income. When Michelle stopped earning money, though, the mortgage devoured almost half of Brad’s take-home pay. Of the remainder, about $10,000 a year went toward running their cars, $4,200 to utilities and cable and $2,400 a year to property taxes. Then there was clothing, diapers and insurance. Plus “you feel pressure to start saving for your kids’ university tuition,” says Michelle, “so we’re doing that, even though I’m still trying to pay off my own student loan.”

When they totaled up all their expenses, they discovered that they hadn’t budgeted for groceries. “So I started working again when Ruarie was just five weeks old,” says Michelle. “But it’s difficult to do with a newborn and a three-year-old. Sometimes I get up at five in the morning so I can do some work before Brad leaves for the day. The other night, I worked until midnight. During the day, I’ll put the kids in their rooms for half an hour so I can make a couple of phone calls. It’s a juggling act.”

Brad says they’re now in “a holding pattern” which he thinks they can maintain until Finleigh and Ruarie are older, as long as they continue to stick to a very tight budget. They’re getting by, but another child could push them over the edge. “We’re realizing that for us to have a third would mean moving,” says Michelle. “Plus, we’d have to get a new car. There’s just not enough room in our car for three child seats.” A third child would also consume Michelle’s few remaining hours for freelance work and make their finances impossible.

Ottawa’s attitude toward the Finleighs and Ruaries of the world has long been one of disinterest. It doesn’t see any reason to discourage kids, but it sees no rationale to encourage them either. Government views children strictly as an individual decision — a personal expenditure that is your choice and not one that other taxpayers should be tapped to support.

This attitude makes sense up to a point. No one wants to be called upon to bankroll the eighth or ninth child in a neighbor’s brood. But as fertility rates have declined well below replacement levels, our lack of pro-family policies seems increasingly senseless. If we don’t encourage kids, who is going to support any of us in the future? Just as childless couples in Victorian times had to worry about who would look after them in their old age, so we as a society now have to worry about who will pay for the social programs we’ve promised ourselves.

There is also the question of justice. The government typically looks at the entire income of your family when judging your eligibility for welfare or social programs. But when it comes to taxing you, government switches course and views each of us as an individual, whether we’re supporting just ourselves or a family of six.

This isn’t the way the rest of the world works. Jack Mintz, director of the international tax program at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, says that almost every other developed country encourages larger families by offering tax deductions for kids, and those deductions are worth thousands of dollars. “You should recognize that it costs more for a grouping of many people to live on a given income than a single individual,” Mintz says. “Most other countries offer more in the way of deductions or credits for children than Canada does.”

France, for instance, has a very different view from Canada on how taxes should be levied. Rather than taxing its citizens as individuals, France taxes family units. Each family files a return, showing its total income and total number of people living on that income. The family can allocate that money for tax purposes among family members to better reflect how it is actually spent.

This system amounts to income splitting and it can dramatically reduce the tax a family pays. A husband who earns the equivalent of $90,000 can split it with his stay-at-home wife so that each pays tax on only $45,000. In fact, France goes even further and allows parents to split incomes with their kids too (each of the first two children is worth half an adult, and subsequent kids are worth a full adult). The more children you’re supporting, the lower your tax rate.

Danièle Bélanger says lower taxes made a huge difference to her family’s standard of living during a year in France. But taxes were just the beginning. “In France, the general premise is that the majority of families have two working parents, so the infrastructure is designed from the ground up to meet the needs of people in that situation,” says the married mother of three. “In Canada, the majority of families have two parents working too, but the system hasn’t changed since the ’60s, when the mother usually stayed home.”

In France, access to licensed, affordable daycare is viewed as a right, says Bélanger, a sociology professor in London, Ont. Daycare is available for children six months old and up and the cost is subsidized and geared to income, so it’s affordable for everyone. Those with three or more children are rewarded with an extra monthly allowance of about $400, plus the famous carte famille nombreuse (“the large family card”). This token of appreciation to large families provides the kinds of benefits usually reserved for seniors, such as 50% off train tickets if you book in advance, 25% off the Paris subway, and discounts at museums and art galleries. “The general feeling is that society should share the costs of large families because we all benefit,” says Bélanger. “Whereas here in Canada, the attitude is it was your crazy decision to have kids, so the more you have, the poorer you’ll be.”

France proves that fertility follows finances. In most European countries, fertility rates have been declining for 40 years. They’ve recently reached crisis levels in countries such as Spain, Greece, Italy and Germany. But not in France. There, the fertility rate has been steadily rising. Couples now average two children. This is the balancing point at which parents are replacing themselves, ensuring that the country doesn’t shrink, and it seems to have been reached largely as a result of France’s deliberate policy of encouraging kids.

The correlation between government support for children and high birth rates is the opposite of what most people would predict. Conservative pundits argue that the best way to reverse the decline in birth rates would be a return to a traditional society, in which the father works and the mother stays home to look after the kids. But the evidence indicates that the reverse is true. Countries such as Spain, Greece, Italy and Germany, where fertility rates have dipped to dangerously low levels, have more traditional cultures that favor stay-at-home mothers. Countries where fertility rates are higher, such as France, Norway and Sweden, have more progressive governments, which provide generous maternity benefits, subsidized daycare and child tax deductions that make it easier for women to have both kids and jobs.

Which type of country do we want Canada to be? Right now, our fertility rate is at 1.5 and dropping. Europe’s experience indicates that if we continue to implement policies that pretend most women stay at home with the kids, we will see our fertility rate slide to around 1.3, the same as in Greece, Spain and Italy. On the other hand, like France, we could bring in policies that encourage young couples to have larger families.

A 2002 study by Kevin Milligan, now assistant professor of economics at the University of British Columbia, suggests that if the will is there, we could easily follow France’s example. Milligan looked at the link between public policy and fertility levels by analyzing data from the Allowance for Newborn Children, a baby bonus program that ran in Quebec from 1988 through 1996. He found that the program, which gave families sizable cash bonuses for having children, succeeded in encouraging an extra 93,000 births that would not have occurred without the program. But the program was eventually cancelled because of its cost: Milligan estimates that each additional child cost about $15,000 in public funds.

When you consider that every child will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes during their working lives, perhaps the expense is worth it. For that matter, you can ask mothers such as Irma Grande-Bergeret, who put off having her daughter Brianna until she was almost 41 for financial reasons, how much difference a little money makes.

Irma lives with her husband Jules and three-year-old daughter Brianna just north of Bolton, Ont. She says that when she married Jules 18 years ago, they “weren’t mentally prepared” for children, but then when they decided to have kids a few years later, it was finances that got in the way. Jules, who works as a window-installer, had periods where he was only working seasonally, and sometimes it was Irma’s salary that kept them afloat. There was no way they could afford to live on just 55% of Irma’s pay, even during a shortened maternity leave. That’s why she waited until Jules had a more regular job, she says. But they had to wait so long, Irma was almost too old to conceive by the time she felt they could afford a child.

Having a child has turned out to be even more expensive than the couple thought. There was the cost of moving out of their tiny place in the city to a house in the country, so Brianna could have a backyard to play in. Then there was daycare. “I’ve paid over $13,000 a year for Brianna’s daycare, yet they only let you declare $7,000 on your taxes,” Irma says. “Why don’t they recognize the actual cost?” Moving and daycare expenses grew so high that the couple had to cash in some of their RRSPs to tide them over. Their emergency fund of $5,000 has dwindled to $2,000.

Irma gets up early every weekday, drives Brianna to daycare, then makes the hour-long drive to Toronto where she provides vocational rehabilitation services for injured workers in the food industry. Every day at 4:30 p.m. she rushes out the door and drives back to Bolton to pick up Brianna from the daycare before it closes. If she has grocery shopping to do, she tries to squeeze it in at lunch. “I don’t have the choice not to work any more,” Irma says. “And financially, things are much harder. In the end it was finances that kept us from having two kids — we just weren’t sure if we could afford it.”

Couples such as Irma and Jules show the reality of having kids in Canada. Few people say, “I’m not going to have any kids because they’re too expensive.” Instead, families simply stop after one or two kids because life becomes too difficult. Roderic Beaujot, a professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario, says the trend to small families is making him nervous. Statistics Canada predicts that seniors aged 65 and over will outnumber children within eight years. This will be the first time in Canadian history that the grey-haired set will be larger than the 15-and-under group. The population shift suggests that kids could be sidelined as we cater more and more to the needs of aging boomers. “[The trend] indicates a society that’s not open to children and the renewal, youth and creativity that children represent,” Beaujot says. “An aging society is a different society. It’s one that will focus on the elderly. As society gets older, there will be less and less concern about youth and young people.”

The solution to our demographic dilemma involves a few simple remedies. Mintz, the tax expert, says the first step would be to reward people who have children with substantial tax deductions — not the paltry amounts they get now, but real deductions that acknowledge the true magnitude of the costs involved when families decide to add another mouth to feed.

Better pay for new mothers would help, too. Beaujot says that when he asks what changes would have the biggest positive impact on young families, his students always say that longer leave and more maternity pay top the list. Most countries with higher fertility rates than Canada offer more than we do.

The third prong to the solution would be better daycare. The debate over whether it’s better to give parents more money to spend on private daycare or offer subsidized universal daycare rages on. In the meantime, parents make do with a woefully inadequate government stipend of $100 a month per child under six.

If the government continues to do nothing, our demographic destiny is inescapable. Right now, we’re putting the needs of older Canadians ahead of the needs of young families and their children. We’re focusing on our past instead of the future. It’s easy to understand why young couples such as Brad and Michelle are having fewer children, given the economic realities.

Unless Canada changes, we’re shaping a future in which a greying population will look to the young for financial support of its favorite medicare and pension programs — and the young won’t be there. Encouraging couples to have children helps everybody. We can make simple changes that allow families to have the kids they want, or we can sit back, do nothing and wait for our looming population crisis to hit us in the face. It is our future, and it is ours to decide. ]]> http://www.moneysense.ca/2007/09/28/the-war-on-the-family/feed/ 57 http://www.moneysense.ca/2007/08/22/the-drug-free-zone/ http://www.moneysense.ca/2007/08/22/the-drug-free-zone/#comments Wed, 22 Aug 2007 05:00:00 +0000 admin http://20070822_112215_7072 When Gillian and David Crammond moved into a new home on the outskirts of Toronto, they were determined to grow a lawn free of toxic chemicals. “I just knew that spraying a weird chemical whose name I can’t pronounce onto the lawn couldn’t be good,” says Gillian, a manager at Sheridan Nurseries in Mississauga, Ont.

Living without pesticides entailed some compromises. The Crammonds had to forgo grass in shady areas and cultivate low plants instead. They also had to do the hard work of replenishing their soil with mineral-filled compost and reseeding the grass several times. But after a couple of years their grass and plants were strong and hardy enough to sustain themselves with little watering or weeding—and absolutely no chemicals. “I sometimes let a few weeds overtake the lawn instead of digging out every single one,” says Gillian, “but a bit of clover or wood anemone in my lawn doesn’t really bother me.”

The Crammonds are part of a growing movement among gardeners to avoid chemical pesticides. Once regarded as the gardener’s best friend, pesticides are being viewed with increasing suspicion. These powerful chemicals leach into our water and wind up in our bodies, with effects that may be worse than we thought.

Numerous studies have implicated high pesticide levels in everything from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine earlier this year announced findings that suggest a link between increased use of pesticides and higher levels of premature births. “As a neonatologist, I am seeing a growing number of birth defects, and preterm births, and I think we have to face up to the environmental causes,” said Dr. Paul Winchester, professor of clinical pediatrics at Indiana University. In response to such research, more than 65 communities across Canada have restricted the use of chemical pesticides.

So how do you grow a perfect green carpet of grass without chemicals? Rest assured, it is possible. “An organic lawn, properly put in and maintained, can look better than a chemically sprayed one,” says Carole Rubin, a gardening enthusiast in Garden Bay, B.C., and author of How to Get Your Lawn and Garden Off Drugs.

Most of the time and money involved in going green will come in the first couple of years, when you have to do the prep work necessary to create the conditions for a healthy lawn. “If you’re starting from scratch, the first two years of your organic lawn plan maybe more expensive because of the purchase of new soil and new compost,” says Paul Tukey, author of The Organic Lawn Care Manual. “But over time—starting in year three and four—you’ll save time and money.”

You can find a treasure trove of information at Safelawns.org, a website packed with tips on pesticide-free gardening. Here you can read about organic lawn care products, which are made from manure, bonemeal, blood meal and alfalfa. Unlike their chemical equivalents, these organic fertilizers don’t kill bugs or plants—instead, they encourage so-called good bugs. “Worms, bees, butterflies, ladybugs and birds are all good things for your garden and your soil,” says Tukey. “Worms aerate your soil, bees pollinate.”

You must be patient, though. Organic fertilizers require three to four weeks to have an effect, because they have to decompose before they can be used by plants. (In contrast, the nutrients in chemical fertilizers are already in inorganic form and so can immediately be used by the plants.) You also have to prepare your lawn. Here’s how do that.

Juice up your soil. You should celebrate spring by spreading sheep manure or compost on your grass. Then fertilize the soil with a natural fertilizer such as Myke’s Step 1 or Wegener’s Lawn Food.

Resist the temptation to use synthetic fertilizers. They give a one-time boost to your lawn, but do little for the health of the soil underneath. “Using synthetic fertilizers is like taking a vitamin C pill while living on a junk food diet,” says Karen Landman, an associate professor in environmental design and rural development at the University of Guelph.” It’s a quick fix. Whereas using an organic fertilizer is much like getting your vitamin C from an orange.”

Go for variety. Grasses vary in the type of climate they prefer, the amount of water they need, their resistance to pests, their tolerance to shade, and the degree of wear they can withstand. So rather than trying to plant just one type of grass, plant several. “A mix of grass species is good,” says Landman. “Some come up quicker, some slower, some adapt better to either sun or shade while some will tough it out in poor soils better than others. A good mix will guarantee you better results.”

Help your lawn breathe. The soil under your lawn becomes compacted over time. The denser soil makes it harder for grass roots to grow and reduces water absorption. You can fix the problem by renting an aerator from a local garden centre. It will punch holes in your soil to help insects and worms move through the soil. And yes, worms are good. They eat organic matter, such as leaves, and their castings fertilize the soil. If your lawn doesn’t have many worms, buy some at the garden centre and scatter them across your property. “The best thing you can do for your garden is to feed worms with compost,” says Landman. “Worms make for healthy soil and plants.”

Water sparingly. Once your grass or garden is planted, water deeply—about 45 minutes with the sprinkler—but only every week to 10 days. Do it in the early morning. Water added in the heat of the day will evaporate and watering late at night encourages lawn fungus.

Cut your grass high. Longer grass provides a cooler environment for your lawn, helping it retain water in the soil for a longer period of time. Setting your lawn mower at 7.5 cm (3 inches) and mowing your lawn when it reaches 11cm (4.5 inches) in height will encourage deep roots.

As well, let your grass clippings compost themselves into the turf. They add natural fertilizer to the soil. And don’t worry—grass doesn’t have to be cut every week. Every two to three weeks is better.

Get off grass. The most environmentally safe way to remove weeds is to get down on your knees and pull them out. If that doesn’t appeal, you may want to consider doing away with grass and using low plants such as ground cover instead. “I took out our grass lawn five years ago,” says Lorraine Johnson, a Toronto writer. Her backyard is now a woodland garden studded with 30 native trees. Her front yard is full of native shrubs, including fragrant sumac and high-bush cranberry. “I don’t water at all now that my seedlings are established,” says Johnson. “Both gardens are really low maintenance.”

I discovered this last summer when I ordered $3,200 worth of living room furniture from a family-run retailer in Toronto. The furniture never arrived, and you can imagine my horror when I learned the store had gone bankrupt and the prospects for getting my money back were zilch.

So, how did I end up with a full refund less than a month later? I used a little known credit card feature called chargeback.

Chargeback refunds your money if, say, you buy a laptop from an online retailer but what arrives is the wrong model. Or your car’s brakes fail right after you spent hundreds of dollars having them fixed.

The chargeback feature is offered by all major credit cards and their associated banks, but before you use it, you have to try to resolve the issue with the merchant. If that fails, you must call the bank that issued your card within four months from the time the charge appears on your statement and ask for the chargeback or disputes department. After receiving the relevant information and receipts, the bank will launch an investigation. If the merchant disputes your claim, the bank will consider both sides, and the decision whether to refund your money is at the bank’s discretion. But, says Craig Penney of MasterCard Canada, “as long as the dispute is legitimate the chances of success are generally very high.”

My first reaction was to scoff. No one has an all-stock portfolio. It’s too much of a good thing, like eating nothing but ice cream for dinner, or spending eight hours on a roller coaster. But it turns out that our reader was asking a good question, one that still causes heated debate among top investing gurus.

Why do we need bonds?

Conventional portfolios almost always contain a healthy dollop of bonds, because investing can be a wild and scary ride, and bonds can cushion the bumps without significantly hurting your returns.

For example, if you went all-stock and invested your life savings in the major players on the Toronto Stock Exchange 30 years ago, you would have enjoyed an average annual return of 12.1%. That sounds fantastic, but it glosses over the horrifying years you would have endured along the way. Like 1990, when the markets went into a funk that would have cost you 15% of your money in three years, or 2001, when you would have lost 24%.

On the other hand, if you put 60% of your money into stocks and 40% into bonds, your worst drop would have been a minor 8% tumble in 2001. Not only that, but your average return of 11.5% a year would have been almost as high as your return with the all-stock portfolio.

So why would you ditch bonds?

Bonds make investing much less risky, so I was surprised when I called up William Bernstein, author of The Four Pillars of Investing, for a second opinion and he told me that there are indeed cases where you might want to ditch them altogether.

“I’m not entirely unsympathetic to your reader’s point of view,” Bernstein told me from his Portland, Ore., office. “Because he’s right, over long periods of time stock returns probably are going to be higher than bond returns. But it only works if he’s investing his money in a taxable account.”

Bernstein, a well-known author and money manager who has devoted much of his life to analyzing securities performance data, took me through the numbers and showed me that if you’re investing inside an RRSP, where you don’t have to worry about taxes until you take your money out, an all-stock portfolio just isn’t worth it. Part of the reason is that you’ll get an extra boost every time you rebalance a portfolio that contains bonds. For instance, if you have a portfolio that’s 60% stocks and 40% bonds, rebalancing it back to its original proportions once a year forces you to sell high and buy low, delivering an extra 0.3 to 0.5 of a percentage point per year. That helps elevate the performance of a mixed portfolio to the point where it’s getting pretty darn close to that of an all-stock portfolio.

But here’s where the debate starts to heat up: Though your financial adviser would have kittens at the thought of it, Bernstein and others, such as Stephen Jarislowsky, the billionaire Canadian money manager, say that if you plan to hold a large sum of money outside of an RRSP for a long period of time, you may indeed want to ditch the bonds altogether and go 100% stocks. Why? Because the interest you get from bonds is taxed at a much higher rate than the capital gains and dividends you get from stocks, and those extra taxes drag down your returns. Bernstein’s opinion is that if you’re exposed to taxes, an all-stock portfolio boosts your performance enough to make the extra bumps along the way worth it.

But can you handle the ride?

Still, Bernstein had some final words of caution. “The problem with your reader’s point of view is that this is the sort of reasoning you always hear at the top of a bull market. There are a lot of people out there who think they can tolerate an all-stock portfolio, but when the ottoman hits the fan, they’re not quite as disciplined as they thought.”

In other words, if you think that you might start questioning your strategy after three years of negative returns and losing a quarter of your life savings, throw some bonds in there. You’ll sleep much better, even if you make a bit less.