Acre75 is a one-of-a-kind Canadian family-owned company. And it’s redefining what it means to shop local while enjoying the convenience of online shopping.

Acre75 is a one-of-a-kind Canadian family-owned company. And it’s redefining what it means to shop local while enjoying the convenience of online shopping. Located in Perth County, Ontario, Acre75’s online shop and subscription box service are stocked entirely with quality products made by makers in small communities with less than 30,000 population. Scrolling through the company’s product catalogue is like taking a small-town road trip across Canada. Acre75 is celebrating its fifth anniversary, so here are five reasons you’ll want to consider Acre75 for your next shopping experience.   

Convenience that makes you feel good supporting local 

More than 70 percent of Canadians have purchased goods or services online. While we like the convenience of shopping online, many of us also like the idea of supporting local businesses. Unlike most online shopping sites, Acre75 gives us both. And it has opened up a national audience for many local makers.

Quality products you’ll use

Acre75 sources high-quality products, ranging from home goods to all-natural bath and body products to gourmet food items and more. Locally made products are more valuable because of the amount of time and care that has gone into the making of these products, most of which are made by hand in small batches. These are the kinds of goods you’ll want to use and tell your friends about.

Businesses in small towns are the anchor of their communities. When you buy their products they can invest in their community, by supporting other local businesses, sponsoring local sports teams, arts clubs, and other civic groups.

You can be a difference maker

Businesses in small towns are the anchor of their communities. When you buy their products they can invest in their community, by supporting other local businesses, sponsoring local sports teams, arts clubs, and other civic groups. Income is recirculated, so when you support a small-town business, you’re also supporting an entire community. 

Feel good about supporting rural mental health

Acre75 founder, Virginia Ehrlich, is passionate about supporting mental health. Normalizing this conversation is especially important in small communities where there is limited access to mental health services and an increased sense of stigma around seeking mental health support. For that reason, one dollar from each Acre75 sale is donated to rural mental health awareness and initiatives. Over $4000 has been donated since January of 2020.

A subscription service you can’t wait to get

The majority of Acre75’s business is its popular and award-winning premium subscription box service, called Acre75 Gathered. A surprise of specially curated products from its stable of makers is sent to subscribers quarterly. Each box supports over six small-town Canadian businesses. There’s something special about knowing who made your product and where (even if you’ve never heard of that town before!) Included in each box is an information card describing the products and a fun fact about the communities they were made in. The boxes are delivered each season in June, September, December and March. Acre75 Gathered is a one-of-a-kind experience. You won’t find a subscription service that features only small-town Canadian makers anywhere else. 

“Acre75 is proof that no matter where you come from, even if it’s in the middle of nowhere, you can be successful. I’m looking forward to continuing to grow my little local corner of the internet over the next five years and beyond,” says Ehrlich.

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From climate change to health care, the challenges we face require innovative new coalitions.

Imagine being able to repair damaged organs by printing replacement human tissues. In November, scientists at Toronto’s McEwen Stem Cell Institute announced a partnership to do just that. Working with Aspect Biosystems, a Vancouver biotech company, they’re developing a way to “bioprint” functional tissues that could eventually be implanted into patients to treat liver disease.

It’s a milestone for Medicine by Design, a University of Toronto organization that aims to accelerate progress in regenerative medicine by cross-pollinating ideas among academia, health care institutions, and industry. Using an approach based on a design studio, it brings multidisciplinary teams together to collaborate freely. Medicine by Design has been instrumental in charting the first-ever map of the liver at the cellular level and is now playing a leading role in the Human Cell Atlas, an international effort to map every cell in the human body. 

There’s a growing realization that technical advancements can only go so far when it comes to tackling complex issues like providing health care to an aging population, dealing with climate change, and addressing inequality. The biggest hurdles lie in getting new innovations into widespread use — this is something that only collaboration among government, academia and industry can solve. 

This is how the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine is working to bridge the commercialization gap for cell and gene therapies. Its team focuses on key bottlenecks to accelerate the translation of scientific discovery into marketable products for patients. 

And that’s the approach we’re taking at my own organization, where we launched Mission from MaRS to support ten scaling businesses that we believe can be Canada’s climate champions. These include StormFisher, which turns organic waste into biogas and fertilizers, and Flash Forest, which is on track to use drones to plant one billion trees by 2028. Mission from MaRS has curated teams of experts to troubleshoot the issues these businesses cannot solve alone: outdated regulations, overly risk-averse investors or cumbersome government procurement processes. With more than 50 industry experts from such organizations as OMERS, Maple Leaf Foods, RBC, KPMG, and Shopify, the coalitions are working to clear stumbling blocks from the cleantech companies’ routes to market so they can start mitigating climate change at scale.     

Will it work? The early signs are promising. In December, Mission from MaRS signed an accelerated procurement process with the City of Toronto, which will support Canadian innovation and help Canada’s largest city reach its net-zero targets. 

Canada also has a solid track record of creating winning partnerships to build on. MaRS IAF, which started as an experiment in combining government seed funding with a management team of venture capitalists, has become one of Canada’s most active seed-stage investment funds. Since 2008, it has supported 175 ventures, leading to $1.7 billion in follow-on funding and more than 5,500 new jobs. MaRS IAF combines a government mandate with a private-sector mindset and is housed in a non-profit organization. That unique perspective has helped it nurture such standout companies as Mindbridge, ACTO, and Nicoya. Based on that success, this January it spun out Graphite Ventures, a new $100-million investment fund that will be able to write even bigger cheques to support promising ventures. 

One of the unfortunate side effects of tech’s growth in recent years has been a myopic focus on individual founders with big egos — successful and brilliant in their own right, but imperfect when it comes to creating a repeatable playbook. As the innovation economy matures, it’s clear that ecosystems are a far better foundation and catalyst from which to create repeatable success. Building coalitions and forging partnerships may lack the glamour of playing by your own rules, but it is more effective at creating lasting change. Truly impactful innovation is a team sport. 

This article was supported by MaRS Discovery District.

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The first generation of quantum devices, among them lasers and semiconductor-based transistors, brought on a technological revolution in the early 2000s and transformed society forever.

The first generation of quantum devices, among them lasers and semiconductor-based transistors, brought on a technological revolution in the early 2000s and transformed society forever. Today, a new generation of quantum technology is emerging that will help make the world an even safer, faster, and more productive place.

New quantum sensors will be among the first quantum technologies to market. Their precision and sensitivity will help peer into the tiniest features of the world more deeply than anything before. These sensing technologies will hold the promise of helping to solve disease, will build resilience against cyber attacks, and help secure the Internet of Things.

Under the National Research Council of Canada’s (NRC) Internet of Things: Quantum Sensors Challenge program, top quantum scientists at the NRC and the University of Waterloo (uWaterloo) are collaborating to develop such disruptive sensors and make them a reality. This means getting them out of the lab and into the field for testing, and eventually adapting them for daily use.

The joint research teams are harnessing the extreme sensitivity of quantum systems to make these super-delicate, fragile sensors robust and compact — and build them into chips to be used in all our smart devices.

Many of these collaborative projects will create enabling technologies, such as new methods for transporting information that is encoded in photons into solid-state spins. This will help enable delicate networks of quantum sensors and other next-generation quantum applications.

The collaboration brings together the NRC’s quantum photonics talent and facilities for building state-of-the-art integrated optics with the researchers, post-doctoral fellows, and students of the uWaterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing.  

Canadians will begin seeing these sensors in action in the very near future. In health care, they might drive new imaging capabilities for studying eye disorders or measuring brain activity. On the road or the battlefield, LiDAR systems, like those in self-driving vehicles, will use photons to measure position and velocity more precisely with less light needed. And in mining, sensors could detect new underground mineral deposits.

Together, our researchers will engineer the next-generation quantum sensors.

This article was supported by the National Research Council of Canada.

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The University of Calgary’s Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking is bridging the gap between students and the new economy nationwide.

One of the biggest issues that innovation ventures face is a lack of easy accessibility to skilled talent. Establishing firm connections with talented individuals opens doors for collaboration, economic development, and continued prosperity for Canada. 

That’s why the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking offers many immersive talent experiences and workshops along with its social innovation and entrepreneurship training programs. They instill students from all disciplines with strong collaboration and problem-solving skills, resiliency, and a forward-thinking mindset that’s ready to grow and affect change to create a better future. 

The Hunter Hub creates, inspires, and supports future changemakers through its diverse curriculum, extracurricular, and experiential learning activities and programs. They build innovation initiatives across campus and beyond. They understand the new economy’s needs, which is why they strive to build a community of interdisciplinary innovators within the university while connecting with talent outside it. 

Honing future-ready skills

A new national initiative, Experience Ventures, is geared toward doing just that by giving students the chance to make an impact alongside real-world innovators. For aspiring student changemakers, these opportunities help to demystify and increase accessibility to the innovation community nationwide. 

Led by the Hunter Hub, Experience Ventures is a national initiative that has partnerships with eight other top Canadian universities so far. Having just launched in July, it’s had over 2,000 students participate in a wildly successful pilot year. 

“Our students are matched with early-stage startups and social ventures. Together they work to solve a defined real-world problem and build a solution,” says Keri Damen, the Executive Director of the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking. “Plus, students are paid for their experience, eradicating any potential financial barriers and increasing access to innovation opportunities from all backgrounds.”

With flexible working models, participants have a certain number of hours they must fulfill, and projects can be tackled as individuals or in teams. Students can apply what they’re learning in the classroom while integrating into local innovation ecosystems and building their networks.

Our students are matched with early-stage startups and social ventures. Together they work to solve a defi ned realworld problem and build a solution.

Advance your career

“We want to keep our brightest student innovators in our local communities supporting startups,” Keri adds. “Our students are getting hired by these ventures after the program ends.” Plus, the initiative was specially designed to reach rural and underrepresented communities, ensuring that the future of innovation is diverse in thought and representation by being accessible to everyone. 

Experience Ventures opportunities are open to students from 14 faculties at UCalgary and its partner universities — encouraging cross-discipline team building and mutual respect. Everyone gains experience in transferrable skills that will be useful in any industry, including risk management, collaboration, and the ability to spot opportunities. 

The university is actively looking for more partnerships to make this program available to more students. “The University of Calgary is on a very exciting trajectory in innovation,” Keri explains. Offering initiatives like Experience Ventures is why the school ranks number one for research-based startups in Canada amongst university institutions.

Building Canada’s innovation economy

The University of Calgary is also the youngest school to be ranked as one of the top five research universities in the country. The institution believes that research forms the necessary foundation for innovation and economic development. Not only are they finding that more students are going into innovation, researchers are now also increasingly considering the real-world impact their research might have. This crossover into entrepreneurship ensures that the school’s innovation ecosystem will continue to grow and thrive.

Experience Ventures gives students the sense of community that’s been lacking during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly through their upcoming Experience Ventures National Hackathon. Collaborating with interdisciplinary teams, participants will work with industry experts to solve a problem — this one being wellness. Students will build networks, test solutions, and learn how to strategize. The top teams compete at a national competition for $5,000 worth of cash prizes. 

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John Luszczek

Business Opportunities Leader, Ericsson Ottawa

The Ericsson-Carleton University Strategic Partnership for Research, Talent Development, and Leadership in Wireless Networks is a strategic collaboration amplifying the strengths of industry and academia.

The best partnerships are ones where each partner amplifies the strengths of the other, bringing out the best in each other and adding up to more than the sum of their parts. That’s certainly the case with the Ericsson-Carleton University Partnership for Research and Leadership in Wireless Networks, which has been going strong for two years now, with exciting results. The innovative collaboration shows the amazing things that can happen when industry and academia work together.

The benefits of collaboration 

The Ericsson-Carleton University Partnership for Research and Leadership in Wireless Networks is a collaborative effort to drive innovation, train skilled workers, and build more reliable, secure technology for the future of 5G wireless communications. 

“Ericsson Ottawa is a strategic research and development site for Ericsson in North America. We are the largest Ericsson 5G R&D centre in North America,” says John Luszczek, Business Opportunities Leader at Ericsson Ottawa. “Carleton University has an excellent academic program, including engineering and computer sciences, and is known as a leader in research. With our collaboration, we’re delivering hands-on experiential learning to help build student skills so they’re ready to meet industry needs as well as defining industry challenges so we can solve them through academic research. This is a perfect equation of having a ‘one plus one equals three’ collaboration, where we’re really seeing benefits that singularly wouldn’t have as much impact as the addition of the two.” 

It’s an innovative step that aims to attract top-notch students. The idea is to find the best of the best both nationally and internationally, and to attract them here and bring them into close contact and collaboration with Ericsson.

Focusing on talent development and research 

The strategic collaboration consists of research projects, the Ericsson Fellowship program, the 5G Wireless Laboratory, the development of a 5G Networks course, and the Ericsson Research Chair. 

John Lambadaris is the Chancellor’s Professor and Ericsson Chair in 5G Wireless Research at Carleton University. He has been active in the field for over 25 years and has collaborated extensively with the high-tech industry. “My area of research is performance analysis of data and communication networks,” he says. “My research started in areas like network traffic modelling and performance analysis of architecture for next-generation internet. These days I’m working in cloud computing, network visualization, big data, and 5G wireless networks.”

Lambadaris has collaborated with the team at Ericsson Ottawa for a decade, and is excited about their fruitful partnership. He notes that the partnership’s primary goals are advanced research and training highly-qualified personnel. “We introduced the Fellowship program for that second reason,” he says. “It’s an innovative step that aims to attract top-notch students. The idea is to find the best of the best both nationally and internationally, and to attract them here and bring them into close contact and collaboration with Ericsson.”

“This partnership is impacting society overall because we’re really looking at driving innovation in Canada,” says Luszczek. “We’re building a skilled workforce through our academic programs and research, and at the end of this we’ll be able to take advantage of this technology we’ve developed for the future in mobile communication solutions.”

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AI is already changing the world dramatically. It’s up to us to ensure that those changes benefit everyone on the planet — and that they benefit the planet itself.

As the information age flourishes into an era of ubiquitous AI, the potential for transformative technological change is boundless. We’re looking at a shift as profound as the Industrial Revolution, with human capabilities augmented by increasingly more intelligent machines. We live in a world that is being reinvented, and so a great responsibility rests on the shoulders of the inventors.

Artificial intelligence — the ability of machines to learn, reason, and react in ways that are similar to humans — is not new. The earliest AI systems were created decades ago, and they’ve been iterated and innovated upon ever since. Today, however, a confluence of factors (faster computing, widespread interconnectivity, and the availability of enormous datasets for training) is creating an environment where AI can truly thrive.

A huge opportunity — but for whom?

AI is shaping up to be the defining technology of our time and the transformation has already begun. There are a lot of big questions. Perhaps the biggest of all is: who benefits?

“As AI systems get more sophisticated and start to play a larger role in people’s lives, we must ensure the technology we create benefits everyone on the planet, as well as the planet itself,” says John Weigelt, National Technology Officer at Microsoft Canada. “There’s a huge opportunity to leverage AI for social good, to empower others in new and more impactful ways to help create a more sustainable, inclusive, and accessible world. A fundamental aspect of our AI for Good initiative is pairing the adoption of trusted best-in-class AI technology with dedicated groups from around the world to help solve some of the most challenging societal issues.”

As established leaders in the AI space, Microsoft has a solemn understanding of the responsibility shouldered by trailblazers. Across its five AI for Good initiatives — AI for Earth, AI for Accessibility, AI for Humanitarian Action, AI for Cultural Heritage, and AI for Health — it has invested $165 million over the course of five years, with the hopes that this investment will reverberate and expand into new initiatives and new investments.

There’s a huge opportunity to leverage AI for social good, to empower others in new and more impactful ways to help create a more sustainable, inclusive, and accessible world.

Business is just the beginning

So often we think of artificial intelligence as a tool of business, something to be used in pursuit of cost efficiency or marketing efficacy. But these same technologies are also compiling and preserving historical artifacts. They’re equally as effective at optimizing the distribution of aid in volatile areas of the world. And they’re indispensable in the creation of accurate and informative climate change models. The applications are endless and each one is a unique microcosm of the power and adaptability of AI.

In Northern Canada, Microsoft is working with the Government of Nunavut to preserve Indigenous languages and has added the Inuktitut text translation to Microsoft Translator. This addition will allow users to translate any of the more than 70 languages to or from Inuktitut, the primary dialect of the Inuktut language.

In British Columbia, BC Cancer is using machine learning to gather data on specific cancer types for drug pairings. “This highly effective method creates a lot of data,” explains Weigelt. “Recently, the lab moved most of its genome database to Microsoft Azure to gain the computational power, security, and compliance it needed to process the valuable data that will lead to cancer treatments and breakthroughs.”

Meanwhile, the City of Calgary and Evergreen are piloting AI for the Resilient City, an AI data visualization tool to help municipalities evaluate infrastructure for climate resiliency and mitigating the impacts of climate change. “One of the largest untapped potentials of AI is sustainability,” says Weigelt. “We know AI and the power of cloud computing will be key to reversing the impacts of climate change as they enable innovators to collect, process, and analyze data at a scale and speed that was previously unimaginable. This enables innovations like the Planetary Computer, a project that provides access to trillions of data points to the world to better understand the challenges faced in planetary health.”

And in Quebec, the City of Laval is transforming its 311 non-emergency response system with an AI virtual agent that’s expediting citizen-agent interactions and answering the more basic inquiries on its own. “By eliminating the clerical task of entering the request in the system, the virtual agent is reducing wait times,” says Weigelt. “It’s also allowing city employees to respond to complex requests sooner.”

Empower and augment

When innovation happens responsibly, as it is here, we don’t need to be afraid that AI will replace us. It can, instead, make us better. “At Microsoft, we’re focused on responsibly creating AI that will augment the workforce,” says Weigelt. “We view AI as a tool that will enable people to achieve greater productivity and growth — not stifle it. Advancements in AI will create new jobs that didn’t exist before, or that we didn’t even imagine could exist.”

The world today is facing incredible challenges, too large for any one individual, organization, or even nation to tackle alone. At the same time, we’re faced with a digital revolution poised to facilitate achievement and collaboration on an incredible scale. So, as we’re imagining the world transformed by artificial intelligence, let us have the courage to imagine it better. We’re on the cusp of an entirely new way of working, living, and being, empowered by technologies that can bring us together and make us more than we ever were before. The lengths of what we can achieve through this transfiguration are limited only by the standards to which we hold those leading the way.

The post The World Is Being Transformed by AI: We Get to Decide into What appeared first on HiveInnovates.

Supporting clean technology is essential to the Government of Canada’s goals for promoting clean economic growth. The diverse nature of clean technologies across all sectors of the economy makes it difficult to define the sector as a whole and to coordinate all federal supports, but the Government of Canada is addressing these challenges.

Clean Growth Hub

The Clean Growth Hub is a whole-of-government focal point for clean technology, which helps clean tech stakeholders navigate Government of Canada programs and services, while ensuring a coordinated federal approach to clean growth.

The Hub understands that finding relevant funding and support for clean tech projects can be challenging due to the variety of programs, including funding, loans, wage subsidies, collaboration opportunities, tax credits and more. The Hub’s advisors from 16 federal departments and agencies help connect clean tech innovators, developers and adopters with government programs to advance their initiatives. Small and medium-sized enterprises make up the majority of the Hub’s clients, although large firms have also benefited from the Hub’s advisory services.

To help drive Canada’s transition to a more inclusive and resilient clean growth economy, the Hub has also launched an inclusion strategy and action plan, as well as a toolkit to help stakeholders apply for federal funding. The Hub is working to integrate reconciliation, equity, diversity and inclusion priorities to better understand and meet the needs of Indigenous peoples, women, and other groups under-represented in the clean tech sector. Applying for federal clean tech funding: a toolkit is a valuable resource that includes information about federal grants and contributions, as well as tips and links to help clean tech innovators and adopters apply for federal funding.

Clean Technology Data Strategy

The Clean Technology Data Strategy measures the economic, environmental, and social contributions of Canada’s clean technology sector. The strategy informs policy and program design, supports sector growth, and enables private sector decision-making. The clean tech data produced is also essential for understanding how aspects of the government’s environment and climate change agenda contribute to clean growth.

The strategy’s website provides an overview of contributions from environmental and clean tech sectors to Canada’s GDP, exports, and jobs by province. It also summarizes employment diversity data on the workforce profile in categories such as gender, age, wage, immigration status, education, occupation, and Indigenous participation. To facilitate greater dissemination of the data produced by this initiative, the website is updated with interactive dashboards, detailed analysis, and dates for upcoming and previous data releases.

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Community boosters are worth a lot. Schools, arenas, parks, and libraries in Strathmore share stories of people pulling together to get the project finished. More businesses are discovering that the community is proud to help them grow, too.

Investments in agri-business, manufacturing, and renewable energy are setting records for the largest volume of capital investment in Strathmore’s history. It’s a town focused on the future and growth that welcomes a variety of startups but has retained its rural roots and a commitment to its community.

More businesses are discovering what Strathmore offers

That is just one reason why Borea Construction has been so pleased with its partnership with Strathmore. It is constructing two major solar projects in the area and has received an incredible level of support from the town. “Strathmore is really willing to go farther to help us succeed,” says Chelsea Million, the company’s talent advisor. When explaining what sets Strathmore apart from other places, she cites the successful job fair hosted locally, the quality of local candidates, and the town’s willingness to share resources in order to help meet the firm’s goals.

The town has a long tradition of being innovative and solution-focused. Its Marigold Library System, established in 1981, was a game-changer. The not-for-profit municipal collaboration provides state-of-the-art library services, now serving over 300,000 people across 44 municipalities. It joined forces with Western Irrigation District (WID), which supplies irrigation water to almost 100,000 acres of farmland, to build a new shared headquarters this year. It’s a prime example of Strathmore’s strong collaborative spirit.

Focus on success and innovation

Local businesses are expanding their reach. Origin Malting drew on five generations of farming expertise when they launched their malting plant in 2016. As pioneers of soil conservation and traceability, they brought a focus on sustainability to their operations. Producing the finest malt for craft brewers has brought customers from across North America.

We have great people that work hard here. Some of the finest people you’ll ever meet…they work right here. We’re much like a family I guess.

An unexpected start-up has its origins in a local farm as well. G&S Airport Conveyor, which builds and maintains baggage conveyor systems for airports around the world, started out of a garage on an area farm. Since moving into Strathmore, the company has grown and invested in newer, more advanced technology. Owner Jim Goertz appreciates how business-friendly Strathmore is. He also likes the inviting small-town feel, something that makes it easy to attract and retain employees. It’s a desirable place to work and to live in. “We have great people that work hard here. Some of the finest people you’ll ever meet … they work right here. We’re much like a family I guess.”

Strathmore is well-positioned to keep the momentum going. “Strathmore offers start-ups a great place to grow. Our team offers personalized support you can’t find in large centers” says Mayor Pat Fule. “We’re a friendly, welcoming community that helps each other to succeed.”

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The New Money Podcast host, Nathan Kennedy shares his tips to set your life up for long-lasting success with money.

Everyone knows they should be better with their money. If you aren’t doing the below (or some version of it), you shouldn’t be worried about Bitcoin or the stock market yet. Here is how you can start from nothing and create a fantastic base incredibly quickly.

Start consuming content

This is the easiest tip and yet it may be the most impactful. In fact, you are literally already doing it right now! Consuming content, even passively, on how to better your money (via articles, Youtube, social media, podcasts, audiobooks etc) is a fantastic way to not only build your knowledge but create a deep burning desire to want to sustainably improve your finances.

Write out income and expenses

This is the part everyone dreads, yet it’s so necessary. If done well, you will likely only have to do this once and then iterate or improve it as you go. Write out your monthly income and expenses on a sheet of paper. You can use a laptop if you would like – however, I believe pen and paper are more effective with sketching out ideas. Really makes you feel everything. After you’ve done a rough sketch, review your transactions using your banking app to further inform how accurate your initial assessment was and make adjustments as necessary.

Analyze what your current situation is

Do you have a surplus of money? Deficit? Are your bills higher than you thought? Really take in what your financial situation is.

Strategize how to improve

There are two fundamental ways to improve your cash flow, more or less:

1. Reducing your expenses

• Call up your bill providers to reduce your expenses by negotiating, asking for lower services or simply asking them how you can reduce your bill and some options they have. Be pleasantly persistent here.
• Cancel services that you rationally can not justify.
• Make your wants few (It’s okay to have that $5 Starbucks – just make sure you spend less elsewhere and optimize for what you really value).

2. Maximizing your income

• Do an audit of your possessions. Sell everything you don’t need / value / use often. This will give you a quick surplus of cash.
• Explore different side hustles. Driving Uber, renting your car on Turo, getting a second job or becoming a virtual assistant online, just to name a few. You could also take some of the cash earned from selling stuff and begin to flip other products. I’ve made thousands of dollars doing it.
• Ask for a raise at work or explore new career opportunities. There are tons of opportunities out there with turnover in corporate as well as local businesses being extremely high. It’s time to level up and improve your situation if it’s subpar or begin to build a case as to why you deserve more at work.

Set goals and budget for spending (while being realistic!)

Now that you have a clear picture of where you are financially, you can begin to set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) as to how you would like to improve and craft a budget to get you there. Make them reasonable. Everyone wants to be a millionaire right now but we all need to start somewhere. Some examples could be:

• Increase my savings rate from 10% to 20% by the end of Jan 2022.
• Pay down 50% of my credit card debt by March 20th, 2022.
• Contribute $500 per month every month for 12 consecutive months to a down payment fund.

As for how to set up a budget, think about a reasonable number for food, bills, leisure and misc expenses, then add 10 to 20% margin on top to account for potential overspending. I suggest writing this out, similar to the initial audit. I also suggest beginning to pay yourself first and incorporating this “expense” into your budget. This means setting up an automated deduction into your investment accounts (once you establish them) / savings accounts. Treat your savings and investing just like a bill and automate it.

Pick a system to monitor your progress

Remember how I said if you do it right the first time, you won’t have to do it again? Well with tech these days, there are fantastic phone apps that you can enter the resulting work (from the previous steps) into. This will allow you to easily monitor your progress. My personal favourite is Mint as I have been using it for years. It links with my bank account, so I do not need to manually enter transactions every time I buy something. It allows me to monitor my finances with ease every month. There are other options out there like You Need A Budget that also works really well.

Automate and iterate

Once you have minimized your expenses, automate all of them as best as you can. This can help you improve your credit as you will never miss a bill. Furthermore, even though everything is organized and automated, continue to check in every month via your system to see how you are progressing. If you are consistently saving more and more money, it’s time to graduate to growing your wealth via investing – but that’s for another article. One step at a time. You’ve got this.

The post 7 Steps to Go from Zero to Hero with Your Money appeared first on HiveInnovates.

If there’s one constant about the mortgage industry in Canada, it’s the ever-blowing winds of change that sweep across it.

And those winds blew in like a hurricane in 2020 — particularly on the digitalization front — with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns.

Much progress has been made over the past decade in implementing the latest technologies and tools to create a more automated and efficient mortgage application process. But one of the biggest hurdles has been encouraging widespread adoption of those tools by both industry participants and clients.

That changed in 2020, however, with social-distancing requirements and widespread work-from-home policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

Not only was technology employed to support the shift to mobile work environments, but it played an important role in facilitating the rapid adoption of a more digitalized mortgage process for clients.

This has happened in large part through rapid technological advances in mortgage connectivity and deal management systems that are used to bridge the gap between brokers and lenders.

Not only have these digital solutions improved efficiency between brokers and lenders, they’ve also made the mortgage application process more seamless from a client perspective. Some of these capabilities include everything from auto-population of documents and cloud-based document sharing to electronic signing capabilities and the ability for lenders to pull bank statements and income tax records from source.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, countless buyers and sellers also relied heavily on virtual appraisals and home inspections.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital adoption

While many of the digital tools to streamline the mortgage application process were already available, they didn’t experience maximum uptake until the pandemic made them a necessity.

One such success story is Sagen, the country’s largest private mortgage insurer. The greater adoption of digital technologies by brokers and lenders has allowed it to streamline the approvals process.

“I would say lenders accelerated their online mortgage application portals. The entire shift from what was pre-pandemic to now, a much more accelerated digital environment, has been good for the whole industry,” says Stuart Levings, President and CEO at Sagen. “It won’t go back. The gains that have been had are here to stay, which I think is phenomenal.”

New innovations to help homebuyers

A growing number of mortgage brokerages, broker networks, and lenders recognize the shift to greater digitalization of the mortgage process and are now getting serious about implementing technology in their financial offerings (also known as fintech).

As of 2019, there were at least 98 mortgage fintech firms operating in Canada, according to research by Deloitte.

Many have been working to improve and innovate not only the mortgage process, but the entire homebuying experience.

Take Properly, for example, a new service that allows homeowners to unlock the equity in their home and finance their new home purchase before listing the current home. Or Unreserved, which is bringing the concept of online auctions to the real estate market while also improving transparency in the process.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, countless buyers and sellers also relied heavily on virtual appraisals and home inspections. While the lockdowns necessitated such solutions, Canadians are starting to embrace the use of this technology moving forward.

According to a survey from the Ontario Real Estate Association, 4 out of 10 Ontario homeowners say that they’re now open, or at least “somewhat open,” to buying a home while only able to view it through electronic means.

The importance of mortgage brokers

While the mortgage journey is improving for borrowers, mortgage brokers continue to be a crucial partner in complementing that experience.

More than 4 out of 10 Canadians (42 percent) obtained their mortgage through a mortgage broker in 2020, according to data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

For most people (85 percent), that decision was based on the expectation that a mortgage broker was best-suited to get them the best mortgage rate or deal, while 84 percent cited the convenience and time savings.

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