Wealthy Barber has new advice to beat old money woes

Large financial institutions have super-comprehensive and busy marketing and public affairs operations.

The Internet and email communications allow those departments to release all sorts of information and encourage media coverage with many more angles to stories than they ever could in the past.

But there is so much of it, it's crowding all of our email in-boxes.

As convenient as they are to disseminate via email, they are also easy to ignore.

Now, many of those financial institutions have hired public relations firms to call members of the media as a followup to the emails.

As good-natured and professional as those PR people are, I'm afraid they are not generating much more coverage.

So when David Chilton, author of The Wealthy Barber and the recently released The Wealthy Barber Returns, left a personal voice mail pitching an interview, it moved up the queue of interesting story possibilities just by virtue of the manner in which the message was delivered.

Notwithstanding the incentive for his initial call was the possibility of some media attention that might help sell books, Chilton is nothing if not true to his message of living within your means.

After selling two million copies of his first book, and doing more than 200 public-speaking engagements a year, the guy is a PR executive's dream.

But the popularity of the book was more about homespun wisdom than some foolproof way to get rich. The charm would likely dissipate if a spin doctor got involved.

And the message isn't really about getting rich, in any case.

In his self-deprecating way, Chilton said he believes he lucked out in publishing his first book in 1989. That's when interest rates were coming down, making GICs less attractive, the baby boomers were just thinking about saving and there was nothing else out there, so he ended up having the market to himself.

He's done a good job of timing the sequel, as well.

He says it was prompted by a regular stream of correspondence from his readers detailing tales of indebtedness and frustration.

"I honestly thought I could help," he said. "I had no intention of writing another financial-planning book, but seeing all these financial plans and seeing saving rate declining and borrowing rates through the roof, it bothered me."

Whereas 20 years ago people were looking for other ways to make their money work for them, now, Chilton said, investment returns are being sabotaged by bad markets and high fees.

Another thing he feels he's lucky about is he really has only had one good idea and he's been able to make it last for a while.

Well, he probably has hit on another good idea. The concern Canadians are carrying too much household debt has been out there for a while.

I met Chilton on Wednesday, the same day Moody's Investor Service issued a report warning "Canadian consumers have become increasingly leveraged in the past few years, leaving themselves and therefore banks more susceptible to adverse macroeconomic developments."

Chilton noted Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney includes that message every chance he gets.

But as credible and believable as Carney is, people might just be more inclined to listen to Chilton say it. When his first book came out, the banks and financial institutions were clamouring to have their clients hear the "saving" message from The Wealthy Barber.

This time out, not so much.

That's because Chilton now is also talking about spending less.

"I have never seen anybody who handles their money well who've done it through doing tricky things. Never," he said. "It's always the same principal. They live within their means. That's the key one."

So while the banks have been making more and more credit available to us all for many years, Chilton's message is you will have a better chance at being happy if you buy a house costing less than you can afford.

He may have sold more books than our most revered literary figures, but Chilton avoids the cost of expensive handlers and lives in a 1,300-square-foot house, including the basement, with no garage.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 1, 2011 B5