Jennifer Mah has vivid memories of a friend’s wedding from many years ago—not because she had the time of her life on the dance floor but because the event nearly drained her bank account.

Then living in Edmonton, Mah had to travel to Vancouver for the wedding. She had to take time off work from her part-time job as a waiter, which meant giving up earnings. There was the cost of a hotel room and of course the need for a wedding present. Then there was the girls’ dinner out two nights before the big event.

“I was putting myself through school and spent a fortune to be at her wedding,” Mah says. “I couldn’t believe it when I added it all up.”

As Mah knows first-hand, the bride and groom aren’t the only ones who have to fork out big bucks for the big day. According to new data from American Express, the average cost of attending a wedding this year will come to a whopping $539. That’s up nearly 60 per cent from 2012, thanks to rising costs of gas and hotels.

Guests spend, on average, $144 on

A friend of mine wasn’t sure he was getting the proper attention from his mutual fund dealer. I asked him how often they spoke. He said “he calls every February and says ‘are you going to contribute to your RRSP or what?’”

Considering the guy was collecting fees on a good portion of the amount invested the “or what” option should be to dump him. When we looked at the portfolio it was mish-mash of over 30 high-fee mutual funds, and many of them were redundant.

If you think your fund dealer is acting in his best interest and not yours, here are steps you can follow:

Contact the company

Unlike fee-based financial advisors, mutual fund dealers draw a big portion of their income from fees tied to the mutual funds themselves. This often gives investors the mistaken impression their service is free.

The fee structure is basically the same whether the dealers sell funds from one company or several. Either way, the mutual fund company is responsible for ensuring their dealers are earning

With a daughter who graduated from university last year and landed a job in mass media arts, Robert Stammers is one proud father. He’s also quick to acknowledge that she’ll be paying for her education for years to come.

“She has a job, and it’s wonderful,” says Stammers, director of investor education at the nonprofit CFA Institute. “But we have been talking about student loans for a while; her debt is a fairly hefty amount. You need to have a plan to pay them down, because they can become an anchor. You don’t want to be paying it off for the next 30 years if you don’t have to.”

With a new batch of university grads about to enter the working world — whether it’s in their chosen field or as a barista — student debt has never been a more pressing problem.

Federal student debt has now surpassed $15 billion, rising at a rate of nearly $1 million per day, according to the Canadian Federation of Students. That figure does not include the credit card debt, lines of credit and provincial student

Holding the same amount of cash as stocks means you could be missing out on chances to build up investments, says a new Edward Jones poll that shows Canadians are holding 13 per cent in low-risk GICs.

Among Canadians with investments including Registered Retirement Savings Plans (RRSP) and Tax Free Savings Accounts (TFSA), the majority -- some 41 per cent -- own mutual funds, followed by stocks at 14 per cent and Guaranteed Investment Certificates.

The online survey, conducted by Leger Marketing in early April, showed half of Canadians plan to make some kind of investment this year and of those, one in four plan to buy GICs. Craig Fehr, Canadian market strategist for Edward Jones, questions further adding to cash and short-term holdings.

"Cash is providing little to no return in today's environment," said Fehr. Given the market's performance, with stocks doing well but the potential for rising interest rates going forward, Fehr said it's a good time for investors to review portfolio mixes

Adrienne Down Coulson knows exactly what she wants for Mother’s Day, and it’s not bubble bath or new earrings.

“I would love some time to myself,” says Down Coulson, a mother of two kids aged 11 and seven and the general manager of eBates.ca, a Canadian cash-back shopping site. “I usually get flowers and hand-made cards, and those are great. But to have some time to yourself doing something of your choice would be ideal — not on Mother’s Day itself. On that day, I want to spend time with my family and have brunch or dinner or go for a bike ride.”

It may well be that the best Mother’s Day gifts are the ones that don’t have price tags — think quality family time, along with some peace and quiet. But a new eBates survey reveals that there are certain tangible items that are more likely to earn bonus points with Mom than others.

Nearly 50 per cent of the 1,056 moms surveyed by said they wanted spa treatments, followed by vacations (44 per cent) and jewellery (31 per cent). Just 7 per cent

A few years ago, while on a boys weekend in Ann Arbor to catch a University of Michigan football game, a number of us stopped in at the nearest Walgreens to stock up for the pre-game tailgating bash. They bought some Bud. Being an aesthete, I grabbed a bottle of Smoking Loon, a nice Californian Cabernet Sauvignon that sells for roughly $15 in Ontario. I believe it was US$7.95 that morning. (Some of the details of the day remain fuzzy).

That trip brought home a couple of points. The first being that you know you’re no longer in Canada when you can pick up your favourite red at a drug store before 9 a.m. And you’re definitely no longer home when you’re about to go enjoy it in a parking lot with some 107,000 others before a college football game.

Variations on both those points emerged in your responses to a recent Money Minute episode titled the ‘5 items that will cost you much less in the U.S.’. We compared food, cars, clothes, books, gadgets, housing and booze and in every instance, we

For better or for worse, mutual funds are just about the only way for the average investor to get a broad stake in the market. A basket of professionally managed stocks can open up a world of opportunity and moderate the risk from a few single stocks. A poorly managed fund can drain your savings, and the only one making money will be the mutual fund company.

There’s a fine line between the two. Once you factor in fees, the average mutual fund underperforms its benchmark index. Investors who don’t like those odds can often purchase the index itself for a fraction of the cost through exchange traded funds, or ETFs.

But you can be on the winning side of the mutual fund game by measuring any of the thousands of funds available on the market against four factors.

Performance

If you look at the small print on mutual fund advertisements you should see a line that says something like: “Past performance is not indicative of future returns.” Securities regulators force them to do that, but while it

The listing says it all: At almost $5 million, it's an exceptionally rare and highly-coveted Toronto Beach-area home with direct waterfront access on an acre of land. There's a two-floor guest house and a wrap-around porch and much, much more.

Just as rare is the section that reads, "$50 Charitable Donation Required/Accepted Prior To Showing Payable To SickKids Foundation. Receipt Will Be Provided."

The idea is to keep the gawkers away, said Dagmara Lulek, the Royal LePage listing agent, who along with Vito Doria proposed the idea to the owner.

Since the owner prefers a non-traditional viewing of the house, agents and their interested clients have been asked to make donations to browse the property at 1 Fallingbrook Rd. The money will go to SickKids, a not-for-profit children's charity.

"This is somebody's home. We can't have people coming through the home just to be curious," says Lulek.

"That's not what it's about. It's about people that are in the market and people who want to see the