When should you start teaching your kids about money? According to Gail Vaz-Oxlade, host of Til Debt Do Us Part: the first time you walk into a store together.

"You go into the store and they say 'I want gum, I want pop, I want chips, I want ice cream,' and you say, 'OK, we have a dollar. Which one do you want? You have to choose."

The problem with most of us grown-ups, she says, is that we've lost the ability to prioritize. So rather than choosing gum, pop, chips or ice cream, we slam it all onto our credit card, and revel in the delusion that we can have it all. And worse still, more often it's not corner store snacks we're after, but TVs, cars, and big mortgages.

"People have forgotten that money's an exhaustible resource," says Vaz-Oxlade, in an interview from Toronto, before flying to Vancouver for a speaking engagement Sept. 25. "They're using credit, credit cards or lines of credit to back fill when they want to spend, so as long as they have room on their credit card or space on their line of credit, or they have equity in their homes that they think they can draw on, they can buy whatever they want whenever they want it -- they don't have to think about it."
The credit critic was in town last month for a talk sponsored in part by North Shore Credit Union, the first stop on a speaking tour of several Canadian cities organized in partnership with Credential Financial Inc.

On her popular TV show (on Canadian network Slice), she offers her trademark tough love and common-sense advice to couples drowning in debt, and suffering the many non-financial consequences of poor financial planning.

The source of many financial problems, says Vaz-Oxlade, is simply a lack of any plan at all.

"Virtually no one has a plan," she says. "People have great dreams, and they have expectations -- huge expectations -- but no sense of how to get from here to there."

People need to set down explicit goals, and figure out how they are going to achieve them, says Vaz-Oxlade. And these goals need to be specific. Simply identifying a house as a goal, for instance, isn't enough -- the couples she works with are encouraged to figure out what kind of house, how big it will be, what it will cost, where it will be located, and how they're going to go about paying for it.

"People, they have these nebulous dreams, and they don't make them concrete enough to achieve them, and then they get frustrated, because they can't seem to move towards their goals," she says.

Setting out goals requires being honest with oneself, and getting to the very core of who you are and what you want to do in life.
"What do you want from your life?" suggests Vaz-Oxlade. "Do you want your life to focus on family? Do you want to focus on career? Do you want to travel? Are you focusing a little bit on now and a little bit on the future? Are you trying to repair the mistakes you made in the past? What is it you want to achieve?"
After coming up with a plan, the next step is putting that plan into practice -- coming up with a budget (or what Vaz-Oxlade calls a "spending plan") and sticking to it.