I’m not big fan of TV. The only TV program I watch is News and it doesn’t happen too often neither, just in a case I eat alone (usually I eat with my family at the table). Couple days ago my wife was out with the kids so I came back from work and seat to eat, while watching some news.
I didn’t catch the name of the program but basically they had a specialist in financial area and the host asked a question and gave 5~10 minutes to respond to the question.  And they had around 5~6 people to answer questions.
And you know what stroke me?! All speakers on the show were people directly or indirectly involved in financial industry. Do you know what does it mean?

All of them are interested in some way to sell their financial products, in other words that we will spend money on their product and services! To me it doesn’t make much sense!
One of the guys was from TransUnion, guess what his cure to all problems was… Pull your credit report every month – pay for this service every month! That is outrages! Instead of helping people to save the money they are agitating to spend even more!
I wouldn’t take an advice from interested party, never! The conflict of interests is obvious! I understand Global TV guys had good intensions, but it is in fact was missing the point show.

Borrowers – Credit Companies relationship
Let’s take a closer look on this. I personally firmly believe I have direct responsibility to keep in check my debt but Credit Companies are not so innocent. The greed and wish to make an extra million that’s what these companies are driven by.
People’s lack of financial literacy widely used by financial institutions to hand out loans and credits on really bad conditions.
 And it seems that that government is not in a rush to help us to win this battle. So the only choice we have left is to help to our self. So be aware of consequences each time when you borrow money from the bank or credit company, be smart, do your homework before your acquire any financial product.

How it works
TFSA works similar to RRSP with a few differences but the idea behind it basically the same to help people save for retirement. I summarized it in a table below and I believe there is a possibility to built quite powerful strategy for financial independence during retirement years.

Here are differences

To me it's clear that if you contribute to RRSP it will grow faster than TFSA but the problem is that you will need to pay taxes on these funds when you withdraw them during retirement and you never know what taxes will be in 20 years so it sort of gambling. I believe we can leverage the combination of RRSP and TFSA for our good and here is how.

Strategy
TFSA is not a replacement for RRSP, it's a complimentary tool. Think about it - what if we will blend them together. Let's play a scenario. John Doe is 40 years old currently earns $97,300 which entitles him to a contribution of about $17,500 , but he can only manage about $12,500 each year. Let's see what's going to happen to him in 20 years.

Not bad at all, especially taking on account taxation aspect of the situation.
Here is a link to federal website - http://www.budget.gc.ca/2008/pamphlet-depliant/pamphlet-depliant2-eng.asp

How you leverage TFSA to retire earlier?

I’m not a professional trader but I’m learning a lot about investment subject and investing myself. Yes I’m kind of “do it you self” guy. Since I’m very interested in a subject I talk about it a lot with my friends and as result I found that a lot of people are asking the same questions at the beginning of their path to investments world. So where do we start that’s what I’m going to talk about in this post.
Did you ever play in Monopoly? It’s very similar and it’s not necessarily that you have to spend money while you are learning.  Here how I stated with investment. First you will need to learn about basic tools.

1. Basic tools
You will need free market watch tool, I’m using Google Finance Portfolios tool but there are plenty available second one comes to my mind is Yahoo Finance so choose the one you like most.

2. Pick the stock
Now you need to choose the stock (please remember that it’s not a real investing but sort of exercise before a real test). You will need to narrow your choice of stocks to 2 or 3 for the exercise. How to choose the stock? I believe it’s a Warren Buffet’s idea not to invest in a business you don't fully understand. I can’t agree more with that statement. So here we go, are you a doctor? So probably you want to take look pharmaceutical companies stocks. Are you an IT guy? Then you should probably check technological sector. In either way buy stock if you understand business behind it.

3. Exercise
Remember we are in exercise stage. Ok you set up your basic tools (to watch the stock) you picked the stock you all set. All is left to watch the stock for a week or two and confirm how accurate your prognosis was regarding the stock. Repeat the exercise 10~15 times and you will get a sense of how it works in general. 

Are you using different financial tools, what they are?