The Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) and the Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA) are two savings products that each have their own objectives and advantages. Which one is best for you?
When should you choose an RRSP?
The RRSP is most often used to build savings, tax free, for use at r[……]
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Five fun ways to help your preschooler learn about money.
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It’s never too early to help them make sense of money.
If your kids can count, they can start learning about money. At this young age, a great way to teach them is through multisensory experiences that include lots of play, songs, and arts and crafts. Here are five fun ways you can engage your little one in lessons about dollars and cents:[……]
Do you want to add a fireplace to your interior? We can already guess what your first question is: “Where do I start?” You may be good with your hands, but building a fireplace is not the same as renovating a hardwood floor or building a wall. Not many handymen can boast that they built a fireplace in their home.
If you’re looking for a guide to build or renovate a fireplace, Marie-Pierre Dubois Petroff, architect by training, shows the steps to take in her book, La cheminée, plus de 120 réalisations.
From the beginning, she obligates you to ask the fundamental question. Do you want a central fireplace, a fireplace connected to the wall, one that is built-in or suspended? Or do you want to install it in a corner of the bedroom, the kitchen or the living room?
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All these fireplaces have their have their decorative charm, but each one imposes its limits on renovators, due to their location and the structure of the building, especially if the idea is to add a fireplace in an existing room. Questions arise as to the evacuation of the smoke, the air intake, the heat radiation if the fireplace is more oriented towards heating than the spectacle of the burning flames.[……]
The cold sets in. The good old fireplace will soon find our feet, our hands, our faces and our best smiles. It will offer us warmth and the crackling of its logs as soon as we get close enough. The fireplace is very practical, but it can also be very beautiful if you take the time to refit it with a nice exterior when you’re doing renovations, decoration or construction work.
A fireplace can be a column of rough and massive stones or, on the contrary, a column with a finely sculpted mantel that evokes Greek or Roman esthetics, to the great pleasure of owners with a classical taste.
A fireplace can be monumental in size and its relief or built in for greater discretion. The contemporary look is ideal for a built-in fireplace, because it spreads softness and simplicity. This makes the contemporary look perfect for a suspended fireplace. Most fireplaces are made of metal. They are so slender that they appear to be mobile.[……]
One morning like any other, when you aren’t expecting anyone, there comes a knock at the door. It’s a bailiff who hands you a repossession notice from a financial institution for defaulting on your mortgage payments. But you already paid off your mortgage a few years ago. They must have the wrong person, right? Nope–the title on your home has been stolen.
Title theft, a type of mortgage fraud, isn’t common–but it’s been on the rise in recent years. It starts with stealing your identity. Fraudsters create fake documents so they can take over the title on your property and then remortgage your house or sell it and, in any case, make off with the proceeds.[……]
Often created in decommissioned industrial buildings, lofts offer an immense open space to decorate, a single room whose dimensions are around 500 square metres, with ceilings of up to three metres and more.
Few doors, few walls, often nothing at all. A wave of natural light from the long vertical windows along the wall floods the central space. Added to these windows you sometimes find a windowed façade, skylights or windows on the ceiling.
Wood or steel beams, concrete, brick and metal surfaces are everywhere. And the abandoned vestiges of the building’s past: pulleys, wooden cases, platforms, giant washbasins, air conditioning conduits, steel tables, oversized chimney.
What do you do with this unrefined decor? Make it your home.
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Once the cleaning work is done, the real work starts. Most owners keep traces of the building’s former vocation for decorative purposes. That’s what makes a loft a loft. That’s what separates it from a penthouse.
If partitions are needed for a certain intimacy, they should be as discreet as possible in order to maintain the continuity of the space and let the light flood in. That is why complete walls are rare. Or areas are combined, such as the living room and dining room. Or low walls, mobile screens, opaque or trans lucid panels are added.
A loft is a paradise for colour. Owners often use colour to divide the space into areas: one dominant colour per area, or one dominant colour on the ground floor and a second on the upper floor, which is usually a mezzanine.[……]
Initially, a real loft was a dwelling outfitted in an abandoned industrial building. At some point, interior design professionals had the idea of using the loft lifestyle in houses or traditional apartments. Easy to understand why: there isn’t an abundance of abandoned industrial buildings. Yet, peo[……]