If you’ve started looking into where to park your savings in Canada, you’ve probably run into these two options over and over: a Guaranteed Investment Certificate (GIC) or a High-Interest Savings Account (HISA). Both are safe. Both are protected by deposit insurance. But they work completely differently, and which one makes sense depends entirely on…
Every emergency fund guide tells you the same thing: save three to six months of expenses. Fair enough advice — but it never quite tells you how to actually structure that money, or what it looks like day to day when life throws something at you. So here’s exactly how Rachel and I do it. Our Two-Pot…
How to Choose a Mortgage Broker in Canada (What I Wish I’d Known) When Rachel and I started looking at buying our first home, we hit a problem before we’d even seen a single listing: we bank with two different institutions. I’m with RBC, she’s with Scotiabank, and each of them offered something different. At…
Introduction If you’ve been following along since the beginning — thank you. Genuinely. When I started Building-Up almost a year ago, I wasn’t sure what it would become. A hobby? A side hustle? Something that quietly faded out after a few posts like so many blogs do? I didn’t have a clear answer then and…
Introduction I used to hate investing a lump sum. You put in $500, and within a day the position is down 5%. It stings — not because you’ve necessarily made a bad decision, but because the timing just wasn’t right and now you’re starting in the red. I figured there had to be a better…
Introduction I picked up The Richest Man in Babylon from Indigo for about $12. I wasn’t sure what to expect — the cover looks old, the title sounds like something your grandad would recommend, and the whole thing is written as a parable set in ancient Babylon. I read it in a weekend. It changed…
Introduction Nobody sat us down and explained how two people are supposed to combine their finances. There’s no handbook for it. You move in together, you’ve got two incomes, two sets of spending habits, and a mortgage staring you in the face — and you figure it out as you go. Rachel and I bought…
Introduction Most Canadians open a TFSA, park some money in it, and call it a day, never really learning how to use your TFSA in Canada. Maybe it’s sitting in a savings account earning 2% interest. Maybe it’s in a managed portfolio that a bank advisor set up for them years ago. Maybe they’re not…
Introduction I’ll be honest with you — this past winter was rough. If you read my 2025 Year-End Review, you already know some of it. The stagnation, the losses, the feeling of spinning your wheels while the world keeps moving. Add a career pursuit that fell apart on me, and by the time February rolled…
Introduction If you’re in your 20s and wondering whether you make enough to buy a house in Canada right now, the honest answer is: it depends on more than just your salary. When Rachel and I bought our first home in PEI in August 2024 for $440,000, our income on paper looked like it shouldn’t…
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