Trusted Tips and Resources

Trusted Tips & Resources

Trusted Saskatoon Financial Advisor Cliff Wiegers Tip On The Benefits of Business Coaching

Wiegers Financial & Benefits is one of the largest private financial planning and employee benefits consulting firms in Saskatchewan. Their Financial Planning Division provides business owners, households, retirees, and students with expert investment and insurance planning services to help them reach their long-term financial goals. They also have a Benefits and Personal Insurance planning division. 


Wiegers Financial & Benefits are Trusted Saskatoon Financial Advisors. In their latest Wiegers Financial tip, Cliff Wiegers shares his experience and the many benefits of business coaching. 

The Life-Changing Benefits of Business Coaching

In 1991, I joined a coaching program called The Strategic Coach which was run by Dan Sullivan out of Toronto. The program has since gone international and has thousands of participants involved globally. Put very simply, it is intended for individuals who are interested in growing both personally and professionally. The goal is for participants to have a great personal life with lots of time off, as well as a great business that generates a lifestyle for them that allows them to live a preferred life.


Why Consider Business Coaching?


Most people think that in order to be successful in business, you have to give away all of your time or to have time off you have to give away money. This program helped me build a good business and have a great personal life. The program offers tools that I can use to enable me to have both personal and professional growth. If you are a business owner, at some point, you will likely develop a feeling of complexity. What this means is you simply have run out of time, and you can’t get any more results. In fact, running out of time means that you have already potentially cut into a lot of your own personal time as well. The program that I got involved with is not the same program that I’m in today, but it has many similar characteristics. 


In order to achieve personal and professional growth, you need to have a good team around you. You must identify what your unique abilities are and try to operate in that area. By doing this, you will generally work in areas of your business that give you energy and are usually associated with the highest economic bang for the buck. This means you have to delegate. In order to delegate, it’s critical that you empower people by ensuring they know what they are doing and have the necessary tools and resources. You will also be building empowerment so that bigger results can be made, and making an investment back into your business. Many times, when business owners are adding employees, they look at it as a cost. It is actually an investment and, if done properly, will yield results that are greater than what you invested.


This is just scratching the surface on coaching and what it’s done for me. If you ask me who needs coaching in business, I would say that everyone needs coaching. But it’s important also that you hit that scene of complexity, you still want to grow, and you’re willing to spend the time and money to do so. If each of those criteria is met, business coaching is something I strongly recommend you pursue.

Clifford A. Wiegers

CFP, TEP, CH.F.C., CLU, B.Comm.

Insurance Representative, Wiegers Financial and Insurance Planning Services Ltd.

Financial Planner, Manulife Securities Investment Services Inc.


Contact them today for a no-obligation consultation to determine how they can help you.


Wiegers Financial & Benefits are Trusted Saskatoon Financial Advisors 


Trusted Saskatoon Group Benefits Advisors at Wiegers Financial & Benefits Discuss Workplace Wellness

Wiegers Financial & Benefits is one of the largest private financial planning and employee benefits consulting firms in Saskatchewan. Its Saskatoon Financial Planning Division provides business owners, households, retirees, and students with expert investment and insurance planning services to help them reach their long-term financial goals. They also have a Benefits and Personal Insurance division. 

In this latest Wiegers Group Benefits tip, they explain flex benefits for employee wellness. Wiegers Financial & Benefits are Trusted Saskatoon Insurance and Group Benefits experts.

Do You Have  A Strong Or Weak Workplace Culture? 


The 2020 edition of the Sanofi Canada Healthcare Survey – arguably the most reputable and referenced healthcare survey in the country – makes clear that a positive workplace wellness culture is key to a business’s success. But why?

Simply put, a strong wellness culture plays an important role in employee job satisfaction, which in turn drives productivity and both healthier results and healthier bottom lines for everyone, from company stakeholders to the employees and their families. But it starts even earlier than that. A strong wellness culture is important also in the attraction and retention of strong talent. More than 85% of employees surveyed agree that a workplace environment that encourages health and wellness is an important factor when deciding whether to accept a job offer or continue with a current employer.

The great news is that it appears that employers are listening. Over the next three years, 74% of employers plan to dedicate funding and/or staff resources outside of the health benefit plan to at least one out of five possible health and wellness areas. Among them, they will most likely do so in the area of emotional/mental health (58%), followed by the prevention of illness and/or management of chronic conditions (49%), physical fitness (45%), social well-being (44%) and financial well-being (40%).

The development and maintenance of a wellness culture needn’t be complicated or costly, though. Providing employees with safety supports and actively encouraging positive relationships among co-workers and with immediate supervisors is a great start. The options are endless from there:

  • Flexible work arrangements
  • Flexible health benefits
  • Well-defined Human Resource policies
  • Mental well-being support
  • Workplace wellness programs
  • Social activities
  • Healthy snacks… and the list goes on


The degree to which these types of initiatives positively impact a workplace wellness culture, though, depends significantly on the degree to which senior leadership supports and engages in them. This is something that my team and I at Wiegers Financial & Benefits can attest to personally and with genuine enthusiasm.

We have been actively promoting and supporting a wellness culture in our workplace for almost 20 years, long before it became popular to do so. Our initiatives have evolved a lot over the years but currently include a very active volunteer social committee that regularly – frequently, actually – does extraordinary things to engage our team socially to inject fun into our workdays, and celebrate holidays and other special days. Even during the pandemic, our social committee continues to deliver in meaningful, impactful, and outside-of-the-box ways. Our management team actively supports this kind of initiative for the comradery it fosters, its morale-boosting impacts, and the message it sends our team that their happiness matters.

Really, though, all aspects of our team’s mental health matter. We have a culture of open dialogue regarding mental health struggles and triumphs, and we support and encourage our team members to share their stories. We also continue to provide our team members with an Employee and Family Assistance Program, which includes counselling and many other mental health supports, and we increased the benefit amount for psychologist coverage on our benefits plan.

We take steps to help our team members’ physical health too. We provide each employee with an annual Health Spending Account and Wellness Spending Account to provide coverage for health and wellness expenses not already covered under our group benefits plan. We also provide a Second Opinion benefit, which enables our employees to seek second medical opinions from some of the best medical doctors in the world. We provide our employees with a telemedicine benefit so they can quickly and easily access a medical expert by phone or video chat 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from the comfort of home. And of course, there’s our Wiegers Wellness Partners Program. The Program, which is almost 20 years old now but is undergoing a refresh and expansion, was originally designed to provide our group benefits clients and their employees with discounted pricing at participating local businesses in the wellness industry. The Program was since made available to our individual clients in our Wealth Management Division too but it’s something our own employees and their families make good use of as well. 

All of this pays off. A lot, and for everyone involved. We recently surveyed our team for anonymous feedback about our wellness culture and learned – or rather confirmed – that the vast majority of our team members are really happy with it. We also requested and are now considering thoughtful feedback about what we might do differently; we’re always looking for new ideas! But beyond the survey results are what we’re seeing elsewhere in our business. Employee turnover is extremely low, with several employees working with us for upwards of 10, 15, and even 20 years. Client retention is extremely high – something we’d have a difficult time achieving if we had a revolving door of employees not well-trained and not highly experienced in the financial services industry. And despite a lot of business and sometimes high-pressure demands, there’s laughter in our office – and lots of it. We all have days when going to work is not what we’d choose to do if we had the choice but the wellness culture at Wiegers Financial & Benefits makes even difficult days a bit brighter.

For employers who don’t yet have a strategy for creating a workplace wellness culture, it might seem overwhelming to get started, but it doesn’t feel like that. Try one or two easy, low-cost options and see what they do. Once you get started, and you discover what matters to you and your team, I predict you’ll want to do more because the benefits to your employees, your business AND you will be clear and motivating. As is the case everywhere, wellness in the workplace is a winning solution for everyone.


Debra L. Wiegers, GBA, CLU, CH.F.C.
Benefits Advisor, Wiegers Financial and Insurance Planning Services Ltd.


Wiegers’ Benefits Consulting Division includes many consultants and support staff who custom-design the most employee-valued and cost-effective group benefits, personal insurance, employee assistance programs, and retirement plans available. Contact them today for a no-obligation consultation to determine how they can help you.

Wiegers Financial & Benefits are Trusted Saskatoon Insurance and Group Benefits Advisors 


Pay Your Mortgage Down Faster With Advice From Trusted Saskatoon Mortgage Brokers

Purchasing your home is one of the biggest and most important decisions that you can make. In the latest Saskatoon Mortgage tip we explain how you can pay your mortgage down faster! 

How You Can Pay Your Mortgage Down Faster 

You found a house. You made an offer, and you got approved for your mortgage.

You locked down a phenomenal mortgage rate and chose a lender with flexible repayment options.

Don't Stop There 

There are LITTLE ways you can make a BIG impact on your mortgage’s overall balance and life (amortization).

If you chose a variable rate mortgage:

  • Assuming you got a fantastic discount, your rate was (and likely still is) significantly lower than a fixed-rate mortgage.
  •  Use this opportunity as a strategy and increase your payments as soon as possible to what they would be equal to a fixed-rate mortgage payment
    • That will mitigate some risk with fluctuating Bank of Canada Prime lending rate changes and avoid seeing a payment shock if rates move up a touch.
    • Increasing your payment slightly will mitigate some long-term risk in the variable vs fixed conversation.
    • Assuming the Prime lending rate stays low, you will be saving significant interest in the first years of the mortgage, mitigating the risk of increases on the back end of the mortgage term.
    • This strategy allows you to see the biggest ‘bang for your buck’ while rates are low.
      • More money every month is going to your principal (vs interest) because rates are already so low
      • Every penny in addition to your regular payment goes directly to your principal balance and pays down the mortgage significantly faster.

Payment Frequency Options:

There are multiple options on how you can make your payment

The TWO options that will save you the most money in interest will be ACCELERATED Biweekly and ACCELERATED Weekly

(the accelerated is the crucial part)

An accelerated bi-weekly mortgage payment is when your monthly mortgage payment is divided by two, and the amount is withdrawn from your bank account every two weeks

(vs a Semi-Monthly payment:  your monthly mortgage payment is divided by two and the amount is withdrawn on the 1st and 15th (twice per month) VS every 2 weeks.

Let’s look at an example:

  • The example below uses an example 5-year insured variable rate discount as of June 22/2021
  • The example below is assuming the Bank of Canada Prime lending rate does not adjust through the entire 5-year term
  • Bank of Canada Prime lending rate is subject to change (up or down)
  • Lender discounts (variable and fixed) are subject to change
  • The information below is for example and illustration purposes only

In June of 2021, you took a 5-year variable rate mortgage at Prime (2.45%) Less 1.10 =1.35%

  • Purchase $400,000
  • Downpayment (5%) $20,000
  • A total mortgage with CMHC premium =$395,200.00
  • Amortization=25 years

OPTION (1)

MONTHLY required payment (assuming Prime stays at 2.45%)=$1552.15/month 

Balance at maturity making MONTHLY payments=$326,422.03

OPTION (2)

ACCELERATED BIWEEKLY required payment (assuming Prime stays at 2.45%)=$776.08/every 2 weeks (=approx $1681.50/m when we average it over the year)

Balance at maturity making ACCELERATED BIWEEKLY payments=$318,366.65

(that is a difference of $8055.38 owed in 5 years)

Taking it one step further: 

OPTION (3)

Increase that minimum required payment (calculated on the low variable rate discount) to a payment equal to a fixed rate (we are using 2.09% in this example)

ACCELERATED BIWEEKLY =$845.35

Balance at maturity =$309,963.24

(that is a difference of $16,458.79 owed in 5 years) 

Prepayment Options:

Every lender has flexible prepayment options (allowing you to make extra payments on the mortgage throughout the year without penalty)

This can be done by increasing regular payments (usually a 10-20% increase per year option depending on the lender) OR by doing lump sum extra payments throughout the year.

Each lender has a different policy relating to this- but the flexibility is there, and we are here to help you navigate those options.

By considering OPTION (3) above – you are using your prepayment options to manipulate your payment and lower the amortization (life) and interest paid on the mortgage.


  • HRun some example amortization schedules for you so that you can see the different options and balances owed at maturity depending on your affordability
  • Move in, get your feet wet with the new bills for the first 3-6 months.
  • Then do a review on if you can afford to do even a touch more than your required payment
  • Every little bit counts!
  • Need some help calculating your best options?  
  • We are happy to do complete reviews for our clients whenever you require some extra info! 



Check out our Trusted Saskatoon mortgage brokers 



Trusted Saskatoon Furnace Experts at JOB Heating & Air Discuss Cracked Furnace Heat Exchangers

JOB Heating & Air Conditioning Saskatoon is eager to provide the best possible customer experience. Their aim is to be a professional resource for our clients before, during, and after the sale! Their team takes pride in service knowledge of modern equipment and training. They are recognized by peers, as  JOB offers sales, service, training & installations for residential, and commercial Heating, Cooling, and Plumbing systems in Saskatoon and area. In their latest article, they discuss what causes cracked furnace heat exchangers and why they are a problem.

Cracked Furnace Heat Exchangers: What Causes Them and Why They Are A Problem

The heat exchanger is the part of your furnace that is responsible for generating hot air. To create heat, your furnace burns natural gas. When gas is burned, exhaust byproducts travel through the heat exchanger. As the exhaust passes through the furnace’s exhaust outlet, metal is heated. Simultaneously, this hot metal heats the air. From there, your furnace system distributes hot air to your home through your air ducts.  

In order to function properly, the heat exchanger must remain sealed. That is why cracks are detrimental.

What Causes A Cracked Heat Exchanger?

The air inside your furnace and heat exchanger gets extremely hot. As a result, this extreme heat causes the metal inside the heat exchanger to expand and contract. Though well-maintained heat exchangers are built to tolerate this heat, eventually this stress causes cracks.

If your heat exchanger is several years old, stress cracks are common. However, if your heat exchanger is under 10 years old, there are other causes of cracking. Causes of premature heat exchanger cracking include limited airflow, and your furnace being too large for your home.

Limited Airflow

Limited airflow to your gas furnace is the result of blocked registers. If registers in the home are blocked, pressure builds up inside the furnace which causes cracks. It is important to note that a clogged furnace filter or obstructed air ducts are also causes of heat exchanger cracks.

Is Your Furnace Too Large For Your Home? 

If your furnace is too large for your home, this is an issue because it may ‘short cycle’, meaning it turns on and off frequently. Therefore, your heat exchanger expands and contracts more, resulting in overuse of your furnace system and premature cracks.

Why Cracked Heat Exchangers Are A Problem

If they are not dealt with, cracked furnace heat exchangers can pose a serious safety risk. If you notice a strange smell coming from your furnace or signs of rust along the exterior, this may indicate that there is a problem.


Carbon Monoxide Leak

Because heat exchangers contain carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrous oxide, a crack in your heat exchanger means these harmful gases could escape into the air ducts of your home. A carbon monoxide leak can result in illness and even death. 

Flame-Out or Fire

Another risk of a cracked furnace heat exchanger is a flame-out or fire. When gas and air combust in the heat exchanger, the gas builds up. This build-up of gas often reaches a high enough volume to be explosive. As the gas becomes explosive, it will force flames and air pressure out of any hole it can find, such as a crack in the heat exchanger. 

Unfortunately, unless your carbon monoxide detector beeps or you notice rust, you may be unaware your heat exchanger is cracked. In order to know for sure, an inspection by a professional technician is required. If you suspect your furnace heat exchanger is cracked, it is important to contact a technician immediately so it can be replaced in a timely manner.

These are just a few causes of cracked furnace heat exchangers and why they are a problem. Be sure to schedule your routine furnace maintenance to ensure your furnace is safe to operate this winter. If you need any assistance with your furnace or home heating equipment, do not hesitate to contact our team at JOB Heating & Air Conditioning.


JOB Heating & Air Conditioning are Trusted Saskatoon furnace experts. They show up on time, deliver on budget, and leave the work area cleaner than when they arrived! They take pride in their work in this city and surrounding area, so nothing means more to us than testimonials from their clients as their preferred plumber in Saskatoon.

Trusted Saskatoon Financial Planners at Wiegers Financial & Benefits Help Keep Your Financial Plan Current

Wiegers Financial & Benefits is one of the largest private financial planning and employee benefits consulting firms in Saskatchewan. Its Saskatoon Financial Planning Division provides business owners, households, retirees, and students with expert investment and insurance planning services to help them reach their long-term financial goals. They also have a Benefits and Personal Insurance division. 

They explain everything you need to keep current in your financial plan in their latest Wiegers Financial tip. Wiegers Financial & Benefits are Trusted Saskatoon Financial Advisors 




Up to Date or Out of Date? Everything You Need to Keep Current in Your Financial Plan

It seems like just yesterday that we first started hearing about the COVID 19-virus, and now it’s been almost a year of uncertainty with only a blurry horizon in the future. What that horizon will look like, or when we will reach it, is still unknown but the hope is that we get there soon… and that we can hold our loved ones tight again!

As we all know, life can change in an instant, leaving our best-laid plans torn to pieces. However, it is critically important to pick up the pieces and find the new course we are to take so that despite the interruption, we can get to where we want to be. As a Certified Financial Planner with Wiegers Financial & Benefits for almost seven years, I have experienced with every client some kind of change in their lives and ultimately their financial goals. Given that life is not stagnant, it’s critically important that your plan and goals change with it to keep up.

What kind of life changes can impact your financial plan? Any number of things can change your goals but some of the most common changes are those concerning:

  • Job and pension
  • Income
  • Marital status
  • Dependents (children or elderly parents)
  • Real assets (e.g. primary residence or rental properties)
  • Other investments
  • Insurance policies
For instance, if you changed jobs due to COVID-19 or something else, your pension might have changed too, which will impact your projected retirement income. Without advising your advisor and potentially modifying your plan accordingly, you might find yourself behind or ahead of your retirement goals.

As another example, a change in your marital status or in how many dependents you have and who they are could make your beneficiary designations outdated. The last thing you likely want is for your insurance benefit to be paid to people you no longer want to receive it, or for any loved ones – including children – to be left out (and potentially taking the issue to court in an attempt to get it sorted out in their favour). Given that the solution to avoiding this kind of upset is a simple beneficiary change, it makes sense to ensure that you regularly review your beneficiary designations to ensure that they remain current with your plans and wishes.

Life changes, and so should your financial plan. Please speak with your financial advisor if you have any questions or wish to review your financial plan.


Kim Chicoine, CFP, B.Comm.
Insurance Representative, Wiegers Financial and Insurance Planning Services Ltd.
Financial Planner, Manulife Securities Investment Services Inc.


Contact Wiegers today for a no-obligation consultation to determine how they can help you.

Wiegers Financial & Benefits are Trusted Saskatoon Financial Advisors 

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