Consumer Insolvency Revisited with Scott Terrio | E113

welcome to the financial planning for Canadian business owners podcast you will hear about industry insights with award-winning financial planner and entrepreneur Jason Pereira through the interviews with different experts with their stories and advice you will learn how you can navigate the challenges of being an entrepreneur plan for success

and make the most of your business and life and now your host Jason Pereira hello and welcome to the show I have a repeat guest Scott Tero manager of consumer insolvency at voice micholas scottt is back on the was on the show back in May of 2020 I mean nothing's

happened since then so I mean why would I bring him back on but you'll find out right so I was back in episode 15 anyone wants to learn that's a lifetime ago now in terms of yeah so Scott welcome back oh thanks Jason so before we get started on why I brought you back and uh everything that may have happened between then and now tell us a little bit what it is you do

yeah well so we file personal insolvencies um we're the largest independent consumer only insolvency firm in Canada we got I know 23 offices across Ontario boys Michaels has been in business since 1999 Doug and Ted opened the doors so it's 25 years coming up in

January I think so you know they've been doing this a long time I've been doing this 14 years myself I've probably filed 7even or 8,000 consumers uh in terms of insolvencies over the years we get to see we're on the front lines in a way of Consumer Debt and because most of our

files are proposals consumer proposals versus bankruptcies and in a proposal the creditors have to vote on it so we get to see not only the situation the consumers are in but also the mood that the banks and lenders and CRA are in on an ongoing basis and how that changes over time so that's what we do excellent so last time you came on something had

happened in the world because it was May and uh you know there was a lot of concern about people losing jobs and other things going on and what was going on so I brought you know we we had planned to bring you on before that but it was kind of interestingly timed at a point of economic uncertainty two months into a generational event yeah yeah exactly so I mean the reason I had it's

funny enough because the reason I had talking to you about coming back on was actually related to all of the co and things that happened then and it's specifically having to do with uh what's going on with business owners right now and how the Canadian emergency business account is coming due that loan uh which

we'll talk about in a second as well as other debts that were taken on during the course of of the uh of covid you know coupled with the current High interest rate environment and just general economic difficulty of certain sectors of the economy right this is kind of a perfect storm for a lot of people unfortunately and a bad one yeah I said to someone the other day if four

years ago you had asked me to design and if I'd been smart enough to design kind of a perfect Financial storm I might have done all that's happened and maybe widespread job loss on top of it yeah so let's talk about let's go back right so Co happened there was a bunch of government programs that came out to try

to keep businesses afloat the first one was the can Canadian emergency business account talk to me about what that is and what the situation is with that now yeah well when things went when things went South in the uh economic shutdown for covid the government reacted by putting out emergency benefits so and

you know they they rolled out in O over time and they were different ones if initially it was consumers Serb was rolled out for kind of immediate consumption just to keep people afloat keep paying the rent paying the bills whatever 3.4 million Canadians lost their jobs in March of 2020 so top that

and then of course there were more as things you know know got worse and then the business uh Community uh received benefits the SE loans what you're talking about and yeah it was a I believe 60,000 40,000 of which was if you if you paid it back 20 was granted I got that right

my you're right you pay back so just a change so was supposed to be the end of this year supposed to be the end of last year that we supp to pay back 40 Grand in order to get 20 20 basically forgiven however it back a year and despite all the lobbying for greater forgiveness because a lot of businesses are in rough

shape we we got instead of forgiveness what we got was you know it's not fair to have that happen during Christmas you know what we'll do we'll give you until January 18th and you got 18 days woohoo yeah I yeah we can we can yeah that up there with the most condescending thing I've seen them say but continue yeah no

I and I have uh I mean I a bunch of thoughts about this based on people we've met with obviously we've met with a lot of small businesses over the course of you know from Co until now many of which we met with immediately so there was an immediate kind of panic reaction that we saw from both consumers and small business owners during covid

obviously so we got flooded in well right during that podcast time actually so March April May June of 2020 were insane for us because people were calling us dozens of people every day each of us you know and and all I did was just initial consultations one after another for like four months and most of

them didn't file and that's because they were out of work or their businesses were closed down so we told them all the things they could do but it's probably not wise to do it yet because you're effectively creditor proof while you're not working and you know you also it's in a proposal specifically versus bankruptcy is a five-year uh you're

entering into a fiveyear Arrangement so you know you don't want to do that lightly you want to maybe wait until your income is back or whatever so a lot of it was just postponing filings at that time time but you know you can think of the main ones that we met with right like I mean there's kind of tribal

knowledge out there now about this stuff so the biggest industries we met with were restaurants and bars hit you know probably the hardest of anything small retail businesses where you know they they allowed the big box stores to stay open but not the little guys nicely done acting and

entertainment was a big one obviously you know iners iners ENT I'm not talking about Netflix which everybody binged on but like I'm talking like plays and concerts and all that stuff and you know because I work at Young and King you see a lot of that Doug and I got a particular taste of it yeah I you know I mean the actra acting Union is up the

street like so like anybody and and and remember that a lot of actors work in restaurants and bars so yeah not only they got double hammered right because even their daytime jobs you know because every actor of the joke is well they're all servers and they'll tell you that right but so that was a double whammy and and then coraly Industries because I wanted to get the word coraly in here to

those to those Industries right so catering and Technical Services all those guys got hammered too because if you're not filming anything right yeah any businesses where physical contact is made so think about this now massage therapists got lots of calls from them chiropractors physiotherapists yoga even which is in

person kind of thing mostly until it did the shift to online or hybrid but a lot of those Dentistry that kind of stuff those people were highly Ed and then other ones that you might not think about which I was surprised by but makes sense is tattoo artists lots of those go down to Queen West they got decimated

those poor poor folks the tourism industry travel flight attendance anybody related to the air travel industry got crushed weirdly on the flip side some places did well so you obviously cardboard manufacturers which I didn't talk to um but flower shops for example you can't visit Grandma so you

send her flowers but here's the thing when things reopened those guys got crushed because everybody could visit Grandma again so all the hiring that ramping up keep up Y and now boom they got to fire everybody again so there's there's a lot going on here that I don't think the public would necessarily see unless they had the kind of ringside

seats we do so that's kind of what happened with businesses with covid okay so that's what happened then they took on a number of loans again cba's one of them uh there was a has cap one for highly affected Services uh certain sectors of the economy and then of course there was other loans as well so here's I think the first thing we got to

basically dispel any kind of myths about is that these may have been loans for the business but they were all personally guaranteed were they not well siba was just business okay okay so let's get that one straight right off the bat because I have to do that when people call right so and I don't know

whether the government designed it that way or whether they just screwed up okay I mean typically and look I I'm in this I'm in this industry and in my previous life I worked for John Deere for 14 years so I also saw that all John Deere dealers who own John Deere dealerships are Independent Business people but they also John Deere made them have personal

guarantees okay so this is typical right of a b of a bigger business where you know if you're getting loans from Banks or from BDC or anybody like that they will typically look for personal guarantees and that's because they want to get around the notion of legal separation in a corporation like if you go under and the business closes they're

going to be out of luck so yeah uh typically that kind of money would be personal guaranteed but CA was not so when people phone us and say hey look I got a small business and I got a CA loan for 60 and I can't pay it back and I got all these other debts and I said okay well let's chalk the 601 off because typically what we do as our tactic is

you close your corporation down file a personal insolvency because of all the personal guarantees and director liability debts that might follow you personally because then you're covered both ways then you can just reopen another business and do what you want to do again that's normally what we do and that's also why we do so many personal filings because so we effectively do

business filings but we do the personal so yes the the sea loans were actually purely corporate and so if you were not a sole proprietor and you were Incorporated and you had a c loan that's your corporation that's not you so you you might owe personal tax or hsd or payroll deduction as director liability whatever but you don't owe that one

personally so okay so that's not on personally the second piece of this is that for let's let's also look at the reality of this it's not that it has to be absolutely paid by the deadline otherwise the entire thing is due it's that the amount converts to a five-year term loan yeah so you know instead of the goal is if you can pay down 40 Grand

great 20 grand gets forgiven you're absolved if you can't pay down 40 Grand then whatever's left over it's whatever's left over the 60 which goes to a five-year loan and I'm actually seeing Banks now putting out offers for loans for 40 Grand so you can basically get that so you can yeah that's that's an industry that has sprung up I I I'm

always amazed that nature will find a way as they say that's it um it's the same in Financial nature I guess Banks see an opportunity to here I'll give you a loan for you longer better terms whatever and you can pay us back instead of them so yeah I guess it could have been expected but it makes sense yeah I

mean from the bank standpoint for business it's like well it's funny because it's like we are going to lose a certain amount of $60,000 loans and make nothing off of this or we're gonna get a bunch of and we're gonna have a bunch of $60,000 loans but if we just offer this then we'll have a lot of 20 we'll have a lot of $40,000 loans right so yeah and for for businesses whose long-term

viability is good and you can just get through the next little while then it's probably a smart move right because ultimately the banks will make interest on that longer term great but I think probably for the ones that are in too deep they probably said no I don't think so yeah all right so okay let's talk about what a business owner who finds

themselves again like there's a lot of Perfect Storm stuff going on right now loans coming due there's already loans in repayment so now this is basically going to add to the cash flow constraints of the business then you have you have again you have slowing economy especially depending on certain sectors I mean restaurants right now are incredibly squeezed of not losing money

so you have this potential Tipping Point happening okay so let's talk about what a business owner should do first and foremost if they if they're finding themselves in a position where it might not be working out anymore okay so let let's do that let me first tell you again what's going on right now that's

different than it was even 6 12 months ago just because it to this discuss and I'll I'll ask you to keep me on track with the what do they do thing okay because you're the host and I like to talk so okay so number one is differences now CRA are on the war path like I've never seen in 14 years that's number one um for the last where are we

at December last 18 months I'd say since summer of 2022 CRA kind of flipped the switch okay so for a couple of years during covid CRA was the Santa Claus of government they were charged with getting money out the door just because they're the government's kind of money arm and know they have access to almost

everybody's information in accounts and so here you go put this money out whether it's personal or business uh emergency benefits so cra were in the very unusual position for a while there of you know giving money out and so kind of not their natural setting now they are very aggressively going after everything they can for obvious reasons we all know that the government's heavily indebted because of all this

stuff and other things and so they're looking to bring things back into some kind of seance of balance for small business is what that means that war path means is that CRA are freezing accounts okay because self-employed people as you know don't typically have wages that c can garnish and so C just instead says okay we'll shut your we'll

shut you down effectively by freezing your bank account because you can't operate okay and we they call us like you know 30 minutes later typically small businesses tend to use the big five or six Banks just because that's kind of they can do everything and like they're not with the Aurelia Ukrainian Credit Union for example like it's not

just it's not a thing they're big six and so cra knows the big six and so cra can easily send a blanket notice to say hey if dude here that owns this small business owes us a bunch of money can you just shut their bank account down for us thanks very much so it's lwh hanging fruit for CRA and so that is

putting tremendous pressure on businesses we're already stressed out and tapped out and so that initiates action on the on the tax deer obviously the small business owner and they've also had you got to remember that when Co shut these businesses down the businesses said okay what do I do to keep either keep open or keep people employed like a lot of them kept the

doors open just to keep people working kind of thing because they you know their staff they know their staff and all that is personal and so they some of the ways they did that frankly and this is time in Memorial is you know by not remitting HST or payroll deductions because they just used it to keep the business running as basically as they could and that's you know it's bad but

it's committable kind of thing so it's always been the case but it was accelerated by Co because you know we had not f this before and many continued to pay rent to their landlords so if you're a small business and you're paying five or 10 grand in rent or more and you do that for six or seven months when do you stop you do you stop

paying rent and go okay well I'm just going to risk you know getting tossed here but the business might if things open again so there's a lot a lot of kind of humming and hawing there and so it could easily though get to 100 Grand that you owe in rent now in addition to HST and Source deduction and eventually these you know business loans and all that stuff so this is a pretty big chunk

of damage for small businesses to get their hands around that were facing here throw in inflation and interest rate hikes to the two other legs of this bar stool that you know were unprecedented Financial bar tool we're we're seeing here and consumers of course now are cutting back on Essentials because of

that inflation and because of in interest rate hikes their mortgage payments going up whatever High Cost of Living and so now when these small business businesses who were crushed need people more than ever to use them they can't because they're cutting back so perfect Financial tsunami in a lot of ways so what they can do BU I remember

well they can call us number one and and in our you know in our long-standing history of studying our clients and trying to put educational information out there via our JP deor study every year or all the stuff that we do typically it takes between 12 and 24 months for somebody to phone us when they realize they're screwed okay so not

to be technical but but when you're screwed you know it you're done right you've hummed and Hau for like a long time and I'll just interject here to say unfor 20 that period unfortunately they're doing a lot of the wrong things right and I've seen this happen firsthand where they don't want to deal with the situation as is and hoping it gets better and they're drawing down

assets that would otherwise be creditor protected right like and so if anything I get the desire to make it better and hope it gets better but if you're you're you're literally shooting yourself in the foot by taking a pool of assets that the creditors wouldn't be able to touch and using them yeah burning up burning up assets that you wouldn't have lost anyway exactly and that's why it is

always better to phone early because keep in mind like you phone a trustee trustees legally obliged to give you all your options or we lose our license and probably only 40% of people that phone us actually file but I I advise all of them 100% 100

out of 100 so if you phone me and you're a small business owner and here's all your scenario there's two pages worth of notes and all it's very complicated I will tell you what you should do and as you said wisely I will also tell you that if you do get to the point where you have to file something whether it's corporate or personal proposal or bankruptcy whatever here's the things

you shouldn't do because frankly 90% of good advice is avoiding problems as opposed to trying to get out of them avoidance in finance is just as important if not more important than any other aspect of life and so if I can tell you here's the five things you better not do and I've written articles

on this stuff okay like transferring assets and like you said cashing things you don't need to right the sooner you call me the more of those challenges we can avoid because it makes it worse time is the enemy of debt period And if you're in debt and you're spending your wheels and the the longer it takes you to phone somebody for advice the worse it's going to be I guarantee

that because there's also a lot of moving Parts here right there's tax there's CRA there's the banks there's corporate law law right all of this stuff we take into account so when we advise somebody it doesn't it also doesn't mean you should file anything now if ever right it mean you know there's probably two or three things you should do between now and when you file

that make you better off I'm not talking about hiding assets I'm talking about doing smart things putting the pieces in place so to speak right and and and the other thing is well you as a financial adviser know this better than anybody I'm objective you phone me with this complicated set of a big mess I'm looking at this going here's what you

ought to do because I can see it right you're you're in it and you're the one not sleeping I'm sleeping fine so like I can sit there and go okay well you know in 20 minutes I think here's what we do and frankly we're often the first person that somebody who's been stressed out for three years has spoken to that's actually helped them and you know so if

nothing else you feel like there's somebody out there that can you know kind of give you some good advice so the sooner the better especially when it comes to a real business mess all right so sooner the better all right so they come and talk to you they basically see they're in difficulty let's say that the business is nonviable going forward or I mean can be viable for going forward but

really it's just a downward spiral talk to me about the steps they should be taking the first steps they should be taken after they've come to the conclusion they need to act well first we decide is this a is this a corporate matter or is it personal most of the time it's personal because what we would do is if if you're Incorporated you know your corporate debts are legally

separated from you that's why you Incorporated in the first place you might not even know that I've had people who just Incorporated because they're you know brother-in-law the cop said you ought to incorporate okay the number of people are Incorporated shouldn't be it's like well what's left in the business I take it all for my lifestyle it's like sure yeah why are you Incorporated well because you know oh you like doing lots of taxes okay my

account didn't tell me not to shut it down well they're charging you three grand a year for it I mean like yeah and so there are people who shouldn't be incorporated and there are people who should be so and and sometimes it's accidental maybe they're in good shape because they incorporate okay great that's going to work out in your favor now if you're sole proprietor we're having a different discussion possibly that's the kind of re that's the reason

you call because we can separate all this pull it all apart and go okay here's you know because there's also tactics here right like isn't just what do we do about the debt it's what do we do about the business setup about your personal situation you know and then not only that but you might be including things in your mind that are that you're liable for that you aren't right so I'll

tell you that like you know the the the the seou there you go there's one there's a great one or I got a big fat loan from somebody and didn't personally guarantee it okay that that changes the picture doesn't it and so oftentimes we'll get them to close their corporation down because by virtue of Simply closing your corporation down

your corporate debts are gone they're dead that's why you Incorporated you may not have known it and now we look at saying okay well what follows you personally from that Corporation director liability debt does so HST payroll or Source deduction owing those are P director liability debts because the government doesn't let you have hook for that your corporate tax that's gone

I'm talking about your corporate tax not your HST a director be like but these are things that people aren't thinking clearly about okay and so even smart people who are financially sophisticated small business owners I can tell talking to them that they're not thinking this through clearly because they're too deep in it right and so we thinking about what they owe right they aren't

necessarily understanding the degree to which they're on the hook well and they're just they're stressed they're stressed out right they're not they haven't slept in a year and they they you know they got employees all over them they got suppliers all over them everything else right and so we're able to say well here's when we boil it down here's what you owe and here's what your

corporation owes or if your or if your so proprietor here's what you both owe and here's what you ought to do because sometimes it makes sense to file like six months from now and not yet okay but unless you called me you wouldn't know that and that's a big relief for a lot of people there's also the the determination as you indicated or you pointed out of viability a lot of small

businesses that call us are viable but not but now right now they're viable in six or 12 or 18 months so what do you do okay well we can have we can make a plan for that right sometimes they're just at the the crest or the precipice of a of a big contract or something right or I don't know a reopening like covid or something where we say okay well then

let's not do this right now let's do this and then do that later and so a lot of this is tactical um and I this is kind of why I enjoy small business scenarios because kind of fun it's for me it's like okay here's what we do and well it isn't just file a proposal or file a bank it's here's the five things you ought to do with your life and your business and this and I think when

people see that kind of holistic now I've used coraly and holistic in a sentence in this podcast it's more of a holistic thing because we're looking at your whole life right in a way here and so because we're objective it's a lot easier for us to point out realities that you may not be able to see from your you know being necked deep in all

of this so sooner the better you might be surprised at what we do you might be surprised that you can close corporation down and reop another one and and do the business again I don't know a months from now or two months 6 months 12 months from now and sometimes people circumstances allow them to do that like I had a guy call me who had five businesses and he was just he was running everywhere and you know it was

landscaping and it was all very um seasonal and those are very difficult businesses and in the first place because you know you got two different seasons two different sets of equipment to deal with and all this stuff and so he closed it all down he took a year off his wife makes good money all the all

the assets are in his wife's name anyway he didn't transfer anything so he just happened to be that was perfect and he's gonna file something now because makes way more sense to do it now than when he's making you know 200 Grand again two years from now he wouldn't have known that but like the dude is like he's he the switch flipped for him immediately

just because he called us we said well here's what you ought to do and he had no idea that that was the way it would go so again people know stuff so call them and let them let them advise you excellent all right so so so let's go through with the process of winding the business down looks like right let's say that they are going to basically shut the thing down basically talk to me

about what needs to be filed what they're doing you know where's your involvement yeah so well typically what we would say if if there's a corporation closing down is we say okay where are you at on your filings first of all okay this is because we always want to make CRA as happy as possible okay especially in a proposal where they're voting but even in a bankruptcy where they could

make a fuss about your discharge as well they don't typically do it but we just want we just want CRA happy okay so number one is where you at with your filings personal corporate HST payroll everything okay because if you're closing you want to do a closing return okay and I'm not an accountant so I can't tell you what all that is I don't

care frankly because someone will do it thank God I just I just say do it someone else does it but do your closing returns right so do your due diligence essentially for the closing doesn't cost tons I mean you have to do some nil returns or some closing returns whatever but it it ties the business up nicely for CRA okay because you don't want

loose ends with CRA then you close your corporation down I don't know that cost you 50 bucks to do on the government website or something your accountant can do it usually that's what happens because they know what they're doing and then we do a probably a personal filing as a result of that but that's what you do you so you do your you file your returns to date whether you're filing

you know quarterly for HST or annually or whatever you do all that up to date and if it's late in the tax year like it is right now we would typically we would would do a year-to date kind of pro-rated what's called a um provisional tax return just to make again make CRA happy and make sure that you have the debts included in whatever we're filing

right up to date so then in other words I don't want you like if we're this late in the year you might owe a ton right and I don't want you covered through the end of 2022 and then we do all this a proposal or bankruptcy for you and then you owe another 80 grand in HST that's not fun okay so we make sure this is complete right so that's the kind of stuff we advise people to do and they

don't typically know it it's not because they aren't spis just because who would ever know that right exactly and so we use partly their accounting professionals to help or if they have ones that either they're not happy with or they whatever they owe too much money to they can't do it anymore they get a new account um we recommend somebody

they they use them and then they're it makes their life easier okay and everybody who calls us wants their life easier right now so that's kind of the stuff that we do to make sure the te's are crossed the eyes are doed excellent so all right that happens now let's talk about what happens when they're personally exposed right let's talk about the consumer proposal and how that differs from bankruptcy because I'm sure

you know one of the things that keeps people away from you is this concept of bankruptcy and basically like The Scarlet Letter that it basically makes people think that that it is talking about what the difference is and then we can talk about you know I guess that answers the question of what what happens when you're exposed personally as well yeah well it's good it's a good point because we live in a credit

obsessed Society now too so even 14 years ago when I started doing this bankruptcy was not nearly as big a deal as it is now now I mean there's way more proposals now generally just for various reasons but yes you're right that is what keeps people from picking up the phone is this this idea of bankruptcy where like nine out of 10 of our files

are often proposals and so the difference is first of all they're both insolvency okay so an insolvency is a bankruptcy or a or a consumer proposal for a Canadian consumer they're both legal proceedings under the bankruptcy act they're both Provisions under the bankruptcy act but one is a deal and one is not so a proposal is a legal

settlement as an alternative to bankruptcy and you have 5 years to pay it 60 months and what you're doing is you're taking all your unsecured debts including tax including HST stuff that follows you from your business including credit cards unsecured lines of credit personal loans payday loans installment loans student loans that are over seven

years since you studied all that stuff goes in and because a lot of our tribal knowledge is derived from the US just because of the internet in the world when you sleep you know when you live next next when you live next to the have an estate tax in Canada well exactly You' have taxes we I know you'd have a million examples and so do I right so it's like I need to file a chapter seven

okay so our our bankruptcy code our insolvency code we don't call it a code it's a law is very different from the US okay so whatever knowledge you have from the US insolvency code is different here okay ours is way more gentle like 10 times 50 times more gentle than theirs they are a litigious Society so so there's lawyers involved in this stuff

it's expensive everybody gets poor except the lawyers and and there's all kinds of stuff you can't include we can basically include almost everything and it's cheap and it's summary in nature there's no lawyers involved that's number one proposal I said like I said is a is a is a fiveyear 60-month maximum so you pay X dollar over times 60 months

to entice the creditors to vote for the proposal why would they do that well because every proposal gives the credit 's more return than a bankruptcy would so when you call me and you say here's my set of of debts 50 Grand or whatever here's the mix of debts and here's my assets and if I filed a prior bankruptcy and my income net net monthly income and

everything I boil that down into a formula not my formula the government's formula and it spits out here's what a bankruptcy would cost you okay because there's a formula and this is what it is so when you do a proposal bankruptcy is 21 months or 9 months depending on your income and a proposal six so okay well

if I'm offering to pay you my creditors over 60 months instead of 21 or N I got to give you more okay so we always offer more how much more that's based on experience and the mix creditors and all kinds of factors but we kind of know where to be we don't want to offer too much because it's easy for me to spend someone else's money but we also don't want to offer so little that it's

insulting and the creditors get kind of pissed off at us and say well you know you know you know what give us the whole thing mon take it let's just burn it all down yeah so we that's all based on long experience and everything else and the creditors get to vote in a in a about a six- week period yes or no and it's majority rules so 51% of the dollars owed is what carries the proposal

doesn't matter what the other 49% say they can scream and kick they're involved anyway so it's a full settlement based on what the majority said it's like an election you don't have to like it this is the result so the idea is it stops all the future interests so you you could get a break could get a substantial break on the

principal depending on the the numbers I just mentioned or even if you have to pay the full amount because your assets are higher or whatever you would still probably all the future interests would stop which is what a lot of people want frankly they want a finite Finish Line type of a settlement because right now they're just you know they're never

paying it they're just going to pay this for hundred years till they die and we're not talking mortgage ratio let's be clear right I mean and also I'll say this much I feel like the last decade or so of lowering interest rates has really skewed people's perceptions on what high interest rates are or how interest rates worked I mean I've literally had people call and say like well this is ridiculous they want to you know this

this car loan wants 7% this was way back and I'm just like and they're like I'm like why do you think it's ridiculous well I can get my mortgage at like three and a half I'm like yeah you realize those aren't the same thing right yeah um yeah I know know you're right you're very right about and I I wrote something about this the other day the last decade

has screwed us all up psychologically for what's normal it's it's messed it's messed Canadians up completely they perceptions of money and now we're going to see exactly what happens because of that and I for the next five years because everybody's expectations are are nuts and their sense of entitlement for

certain Financial Boons are nuts legitimately think that money should be borderline free at this point yeah well it was you know for 12 years so Christ what do you think so yeah I and I it's a very good point because now I think people are going to get a a real taste of reality for the next little while and it's not their fault but this is going

to you know there's going to be some hurt right yep all right so basically let's go over I guess there a recap of this because we've gone through got through some rabits but so bottom line is look things are not great right now for a lot of businesses the longer you way to resolve this the more likely you're going to do things that are foolish or detrimental to you like drawing down assets you didn't need to the bankruptcy

is not necessarily the option you're going to take there's better options or or more preferable options like like we just went over with um with the consumer proposals businesses if you owe siba and you think that there's no hope of paying that back then frankly you can shut down that is an option assuming I mean there's other factors right if you have

if you're like a consultant who runs all their business through a corporation that's fine if you're you got bricks and mortar there's other issues there right so bottom yeah he heavily asset businesses are are handled entirely differently yeah exactly so you have that and but the re but the reality is

is that I think anyone who's who's staring on the barrel of that deadline in June sorry in January My Wish in January needs to start acting uh not just woring right so and needs to start reaching out that's the first time by the way I've ever used that term myself reaching just never do yeah but it just

came to mind I think people need to contact somebody and start talking right because as you said you don't want to leave this longer um deal with it now at least get some advice now even if you don't do anything tangible right at this moment y so I think we'll end it there so Scott thank you so much for taking the time where can people find you

www. toys.com is the is the firm's website you could go down a real rabbit hole on there uh we have thousands of blogs there's we have debt-free and 30 is our podcast that Doug does every week on Saturday mornings available everywhere iTunes you know YouTube Etc I

have a recently formed substack that I've been doing and trying to write sensible things on that I can't think of it so substack Tero I don't know you can find me there doesn't matter um I'm on LinkedIn and Facebook and uh yeah you just um if you have somebody I guess who you know who sometimes people get

compelled to call us by someone else right because their friends or their family go you know dude like you're drowning here okay and so don't be afraid to to to point out to somebody that you know or love or you know whatever that you know maybe you ought to just speak somebody um because sometimes they just can't do it and they need they need a bit of a push so don't

be afraid to do that it's it's almost like giving them permission right quite honestly y excellent Scott thanks so much very much welcome thanks Jason take care take care this podcast was brought to you by Woodgate Financial an awardwinning financial planning firm catering to high net worth individuals business owners

and their families to learn more go to Woodgate tocom you can subscribe to this podcast on Apple podcast Stitcher Google Play and Spotify or find more episodes at Jason per.cup look