Trusted Tips and Resources

Trusted Tips & Resources

Trusted Saskatoon Group Benefits Advisors at Wiegers Financial & Benefit Explains Employee Benefits Plans

Wiegers Financial & Benefits is one of the largest private financial planning and employee benefits consulting firms in Saskatchewan. Its Saskatoon Financial Planning Division provides business owners, households, retirees, and students with expert investment and insurance planning services to help them reach their long-term financial goals. They also have a Benefits and Personal Insurance planning, division. In this latest Wiegers Group Benefits expert tip, they explain just how much employee benefits plans do for employees and their families. Wiegers Financial & Benefits are Trusted Saskatoon Insurance and Group Benefits experts.

 

Takes Care of Employees With A Group Benefits Plan


When employees think about their benefits plan, the benefits that most often come to mind are for prescription drugs, massages, and maybe a dental check-up every year. However, I’m confident that if you were to ask any Benefits Advisor or Consultant, he or she would swiftly tell you that benefit plans are so SO much more than that! These benefits are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what a plan can provide for employees and their families.

Many people – employees and employers alike – are surprised by just how extensive an employee benefits plan can be. They’re often also surprised by how much a plan can do for an employee’s physical, mental, and financial well-being. If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that our well-being is something we can no longer take for granted. And having an employee benefits plan is one of the best ways to stay protected.

There are two cornerstones of a benefit plan that deserve a lot more attention than they typically receive: Life Insurance and financial protection in the event of a disability or illness, namely, Short-Term and Long-Term Disability Insurance. These benefits are often included in benefit plans but are not touted enough for the critically important protection they provide.

Benefits Canada reported recently that many people between the ages of 30-50 have no Life Insurance outside of what is provided through their employee benefits plan. On the one hand, this makes for a hefty responsibility for employers. But on the other hand, employers who provide their employees with a strong Life Insurance benefit have a competitive advantage that helps them attract and retain top talent.

As for Disability Insurance, Wiegers Financial & Benefits is passionate about including it in every benefits plan. The reality is that many employees work paycheck to paycheck, and in the event of a severe or prolonged illness or injury, most don’t have enough money saved to be able to weather the storm financially. Disability Insurance is very often a financial lifeline that enables employees to focus their time and energy on getting better instead of stressing about how they’re going to pay their bills. And it’s apparent that the pandemic’s impact on mental health and disability is not going to lessen any time soon. This Benefits Canada article speaks to how the majority of Canadian employers are prioritizing mental well-being, and Disability Insurance benefits are a key part of what they’re doing about it.

If you’re like a lot of Canadians who believe that employee benefit plans are most important for getting their prescription drugs paid for or their massages covered, I encourage you to delve into the details of your plan. You’ll likely be surprised by what you learn, and you’ll be in a better position to know what you can be, or should consider, doing outside of your plan to protect your well-being. Your personal financial advisor will be a great asset to you in advising you on a good path to take and then actually putting these wheels into motion. But always remember that your benefits plan is likely doing more for you than you realize so be sure to provide your advisor with all of the details. Your benefits plan is there to help take care of you; let it do all that it can!


Jewelian Berry,
Benefits Account Manager, Wiegers Financial and Insurance Planning Services Ltd.


Wiegers’ Benefits Consulting Division includes many consultants and support staff who custom-design the most employee-valued and cost-effective group benefit, personal insurance, employee assistance programs, and retirement plans available. Contact them today for a no-obligation consultation to determine how they can help you.

Wiegers Financial & Benefits are Trusted Saskatoon Insurance and Group Benefits Advisors 

Local House Is Your Trusted Saskatoon Online Retail Mall That Delivers Locally!

Local House Joins Trusted Saskatoon In The Saskatoon Speciality Retail Category


The Trusted Saskatoon Directory team is thrilled to brag about our newest Saskatoon partner in our Saskatoon Specialty Retail category. We would like to welcome and introduce you to Local House Your Trusted Saskatoon Online Mall

Local House was founded in 2020 by Mike and Chuck Le Page, who themselves are local retail business owners with stores in both Saskatoon and Regina. When COVID-19 shut down nearly everything in March of 2020, Mike Lepage recognized a unique business opportunity. Scrambling to buy a birthday gift for his fiancée, Lepage reached out to several local businesses but found it very tedious to organize the purchase and delivery of products.  Knowing there could be a better way to navigate this time-consuming approach, Mike and his father, Chuck, reached out to Trusted Marketing Services, and together, they started the complicated task building on the idea of Local House and bringing it to market with a brand and custom online shopping platform.
“I kept wishing there was a marketplace and delivery system for local business,” Mike Lepage explains. “I had been sitting on the Local House URL for a while, so I did some research on the concept, and there wasn’t anything quite like it yet.”

What Is Local House And How Does It Compete With Amazon?


Michael LePage wants to give local retailers in Saskatchewan a digital platform that can compete with the likes of Amazon.
Local House is more than just an e-commerce store, it’s a local ecosystem and essential a local online shopping mall that allows small local retailers to gain access to new sales opportunities, compete with foreign/out of market retailers stealing local market share and extend their brand reach to new customers in new places near where they operate. Retailers set up Local House stores for free and they can upload their products directly into the store. The development team spent many hours working on allowing Local House to work in hand with other well know and established major e-commerce platforms, such as Etsy and Shopify to make it more accessible for businesses and merchants who have already invested time and money in their own online stores. Now merchants can simply integrate with their existing online store software at the click of a mouse. The full checkout takes place on Local House and the retailers only pay if they make a sale- so it’s a win-win! 

Local House Delivers Same Day Or Next Day to Saskatoon Shoppers 

Convenient, same-day delivery or next-day delivery ( dependant on order time) on most products on Local House, means you can shop at your convenience, and get items delivered directly to your door. If your order total is under $25 delivery costs $7.00. If your order is larger than $25 delivery is $3.50. Some vendors also offer free delivery if a minimum purchase amount is met. 
 

Local House is an amazing and innovative example of a local business whose mission is to support other local Saskatoon businesses and provide solutions to Saskatoon consumers, which is the foundation of why we started the Trusted Saskatoon directory! 


Trusted Saskatoon warmly welcomes Mike and the Local House team to the Saskatoon directory of excellence in the Saskatoon specialty retail Category and we are proud to give them the ‘Thumbs Up’! 

 Local House Is Your Trusted Saskatoon Online Shopping Mall- Check out all Local House offers and read reviews on their listing by clicking here ...then go shop and support local retail.




Trusted Saskatoon Financial Advisor Cliff Wiegers Tip On The Benefits of Business Coaching

Wiegers Financial & Benefits is one of the largest private financial planning and employee benefits consulting firms in Saskatchewan. Their Financial Planning Division provides business owners, households, retirees, and students with expert investment and insurance planning services to help them reach their long-term financial goals. They also have a Benefits and Personal Insurance planning division. 


Wiegers Financial & Benefits are Trusted Saskatoon Financial Advisors. Cliff Wiegers shares his experience and the many benefits of business coaching in their latest Wiegers Financial tip

The Life-Changing Benefits of Business Coaching

In 1991, I joined a coaching program called The Strategic Coach which was run by Dan Sullivan out of Toronto. The program has since gone international and has thousands of participants involved globally. Put very simply, it is intended for individuals who are interested in growing both personally and professionally. The goal is for participants to have a great personal life with lots of time off, as well as a great business that generates a lifestyle for them that allows them to live a preferred life.


Why Consider Business Coaching?


Most people think that in order to be successful in business, you have to give away all of your time or to have time off you have to give away money. This program helped me build a good business and have a great personal life. The program offers tools that I can use to enable me to have both personal and professional growth. If you are a business owner, at some point you will likely develop the feeling of complexity. What this means is you simply have run out of time and you can’t get any more results. In fact, running out of time means that you have already potentially cut into a lot of your own personal time as well. The program that I got involved with is not the same program that I’m in today but has many similar characteristics. 


In order to achieve personal and professional growth, you need to have a good team around you. You must identify what your unique abilities are and try to operate in that area. By doing this, you will generally work in areas of your business that give you energy and are usually associated with the highest economic bang for the buck. This means you have to delegate. In order to delegate, it’s critical that you empower people by ensuring they know what they are doing and have the necessary tools and resources. You will also be building empowerment so that bigger results can be made, and making an investment back into your business. Many times when business owners are adding employees they look at it as a cost. It is actually an investment and, if done properly, will yield results that are greater than what you invested.


This is just scratching the surface on coaching and what it’s done for me. If you ask me who needs coaching in business, I would say that everyone needs coaching. But it’s important also that you hit that scene of complexity, you still want to grow, and you’re willing to spend the time and money to do so. If each of those criteria is met, business coaching is something I strongly recommend you pursue.

Clifford A. Wiegers

CFP, TEP, CH.F.C., CLU, B.Comm.

Insurance Representative, Wiegers Financial and Insurance Planning Services Ltd.

Financial Planner, Manulife Securities Investment Services Inc.


Contact them today for a no-obligation consultation to determine how they can help you.


Wiegers Financial & Benefits are Trusted Saskatoon Financial Advisors 

Trusted Saskatoon Group Benefits Advisors at Wiegers Financial & Benefits Discuss Workplace Wellness

Wiegers Financial & Benefits is one of the largest private financial planning and employee benefits consulting firms in Saskatchewan. Its Saskatoon Financial Planning Division provides business owners, households, retirees, and students with expert investment and insurance planning services to help them reach their long-term financial goals. They also have a Benefits and Personal Insurance division.  

In this latest Wiegers Group Benefits tip, they explain flex benefits for employee wellness. Wiegers Financial & Benefits are Trusted Saskatoon Insurance and Group Benefits experts.

Do You Have  A Strong Or Weak Workplace Culture? 


The 2020 edition of the Sanofi Canada Healthcare Survey – arguably the most reputable and referenced healthcare survey in the country – makes clear that a positive workplace wellness culture is key to a business’s success. But why?

Simply put, a strong wellness culture plays an important role in employee job satisfaction, which in turn drives productivity and both healthier results and healthier bottom lines for everyone from company stakeholders to the employees and their families. But it starts even earlier than that. A strong wellness culture is important also in the attraction and retention of strong talent. More than 85% of employees surveyed agree that a workplace environment that encourages health and wellness is an important factor when deciding whether to accept a job offer or continue with a current employer.

The great news is that it appears that employers are listening. Over the next three years, 74% of employers plan to dedicate funding and/or staff resources outside of the health benefit plan to at least one out of five possible health and wellness areas. Among them, they will most likely do so in the area of emotional/mental health (58%), followed by the prevention of illness and/or management of chronic conditions (49%), physical fitness (45%), social well-being (44%) and financial well-being (40%).

The development and maintenance of a wellness culture needn’t be complicated or costly, though. Providing employees with safety supports, and actively encouraging positive relationships among co-workers and with immediate supervisors, is a great start. The options are endless from there:

  • Flexible work arrangements
  • Flexible health benefits
  • Well-defined Human Resource policies
  • Mental well-being support
  • Workplace wellness programs
  • Social activities
  • Healthy snacks… and the list goes on

The degree to which these types of initiatives positively impact a workplace wellness culture, though, depends significantly on the degree to which senior leadership supports and engages in them. This is something that my team and I at Wiegers Financial & Benefits can attest to personally and with genuine enthusiasm.

We have been actively promoting and supporting a wellness culture in our workplace for almost 20 years, long before it became popular to do so. Our initiatives have evolved a lot over the years but currently include a very active volunteer social committee that regularly – frequently, actually – does extraordinary things to engage our team socially and to inject fun into our workdays, and celebrate holidays and other special days. Even during the pandemic, our social committee continues to deliver in meaningful, impactful, and outside-of-the-box ways. Our management team actively supports this kind of initiative for the comradery it fosters, its morale-boosting impacts, and the message it sends our team that their happiness matters.

Really, though, all aspects of our team’s mental health matter. We have a culture of open dialogue when it comes to mental health struggles and triumphs, and we support and encourage our team members to share their own stories. We also continue to provide our team members with an Employee and Family Assistance Program, which includes coverage for counselling and many other mental health supports, and we increased the benefit amount for psychologist coverage on our benefits plan.

We take steps to help our team members’ physical health too. We provide each employee with an annual Health Spending Account and Wellness Spending Account to provide coverage for health and wellness expenses not already covered under our group benefits plan. We also provide a Second Opinion benefit, which enables our employees to seek second medical opinions from some of the best medical doctors in the world. We provide our employees with a telemedicine benefit so they can quickly and easily access a medical expert by phone or video chat 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from the comfort of home. And of course, there’s our Wiegers Wellness Partners Program. The Program, which is almost 20 years old now but is undergoing a refresh and expansion, was originally designed to provide our group benefits clients and their employees with discounted pricing at participating local businesses in the wellness industry. The Program was since made available to our individual clients in our Wealth Management Division too but it’s something our own employees and their families make good use of as well. 

All of this pays off. A lot, and for everyone involved. We recently surveyed our team for anonymous feedback about our wellness culture and learned – or rather confirmed – that the vast majority of our team members are really happy with it. We also requested and are now considering thoughtful feedback about what we might do differently; we’re always looking for new ideas! But beyond the survey results are what we’re seeing elsewhere in our business. Employee turnover is extremely low, with several employees working with us for upwards of 10, 15, and even 20 years. Client retention is extremely high – something we’d have a difficult time achieving if we had a revolving door of employees not well-trained and not highly-experienced in the financial services industry. And despite a lot of business and sometimes high-pressure demands, there’s laughter in our office – and lots of it. We all have days when going to work is not what we’d choose to do if we had the choice but the wellness culture at Wiegers Financial & Benefits makes even difficult days a bit brighter.

For employers who don’t yet have a strategy for creating a workplace wellness culture, it might seem an overwhelming thing to get started but it needn’t feel like that. Try one or two easy, low-cost options and see what they do. Once you get started, and you discover what matters to you and your team, I predict you’ll want to do more because the benefits to your employees, your business AND you will be clear and motivating. As is the case everywhere, wellness in the workplace is a winning solution for everyone.


Debra L. Wiegers, GBA, CLU, CH.F.C.
Benefits Advisor, Wiegers Financial and Insurance Planning Services Ltd.


Wiegers’ Benefits Consulting Division includes many consultants and support staff who custom-design the most employee-valued and cost-effective group benefit, personal insurance, employee assistance programs, and retirement plans available. Contact them today for a no-obligation consultation to determine how they can help you.

Wiegers Financial & Benefits are Trusted Saskatoon Insurance and Group Benefits Advisors 

Trusted Saskatoon Auto Body Experts at Western Millennium Collision - Winter Vehicle Maintenance Tips

At Western Millennium Collision, they focus on three things: quality, convenience, and service. Quality implies that they maintain state-of-the-art tools and equipment so that their highly experienced technicians have all the latest tools and technology to ensure that your vehicle receives the finest quality and extraordinary workmanship. Convenience is all about valuing your time and simplifying the process of having your car fixed from the moment you contact them. Their shop is large enough to accommodate any size of vehicle, so that you can drive into the estimator for a complete evaluation of the damages to determine how fast the repairs can be done and how much it will cost, in one easy step. Western Millennium Collision Is a Trusted Saskatoon Collision Repair & Auto Body Shop.

PREPARE YOUR VEHICLE FOR WINTER

Winter driving conditions are hard on your vehicle. As winter approaches, it is helpful to be prepared for the icy, snowy road conditions ahead. Here are a few easy vehicle maintenance tips to prepare for winter.

CHECK YOUR VEHICLE'S BATTERY TO PREPARE FOR WINTER

To prepare for the cold winter months, one of the most important things to do is check your battery. A quick inspection and battery health test will ensure a dead battery will not leave you stranded in the cold. Your best defence against the cold weather is a fresh battery. If your battery is weak, be sure to replace it. 

If you do not drive your vehicle often, it is beneficial to attach your battery to a trickle charger or maintainer. Because your battery needs to work harder in the cold weather, it loses power over time if your vehicle is not frequently in use. Utilizing a trickle charger will ensure your vehicle starts when you need it to.

CHECK YOUR VEHICLE'S TIRE PRESSURE

As the weather gets colder, it is particularly important to monitor tire pressure. In cold weather conditions, low tire pressure is more common. This is because fluctuating temperatures cause the air in your tires to expand and contract. As good tires are essential for icy conditions, low tire pressure leads to poor performance on the road. In addition to monitoring tire pressure, utilizing snow or winter tires may be worth the investment. Winter tires will help with traction and safety on icy winter roads.

GET AN OIL CHANGE

To ensure your engine runs efficiently in cold weather conditions, it needs to be properly lubricated. Due to the fact that cold weather reduces the effectiveness of car oil, it is necessary to use thinner oil during the winter months. Therefore, the wintertime can be a good opportunity to switch to synthetic oil, provided it is appropriate for your vehicle. Overall, synthetic oil is more free-flowing at temperatures below freezing and offers protection against your vehicle’s engine immediately. This is because synthetic oil does not require any time to warm up. Be sure to check your vehicle’s owner’s manual to ensure you are using the proper oil viscosity.

PROTECT YOUR VEHICLE'S EXTERIOR

As the temperature drops, exposure to the cold elements is not ideal for the exterior of your vehicle. Whenever possible, always seek shelter for your vehicle in the cold months. This keeps brushing the snow and scraping the ice off of it to a minimum. If you have a garage, it is recommended that you utilize it to park your vehicle. Shelter protects your vehicle’s paint job from the elements.

In addition to your vehicle’s exterior, protecting your vehicle’s interior is also important throughout the winter. Use snow mats to keep melted snow and dirt from wrecking the carpet of your vehicle.

REPLACE YOUR WIPER BLADES


In conditions where snow and ice are prevalent, clear visibility on the road is especially important. To ensure clear visibility, good-quality windshield wiper blades are essential. A good set of wiper blades will suffice for all seasons, and there is not necessarily a need for wiper blades that are winter-specific. However, it is recommended that you replace windshield wiper blades once a year. In addition, a car scraper should always be used to remove ice from your windshield. This will prolong the life of your windshield wipers.

Following these easy tips will ensure you drive comfortably and stay safe on the roads this winter. When you’re driving, you should focus only on the road that is in front of you and if you get in any collision or accident, contact Western Millennium Collision for all your vehicle repair needs.

 

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TrustedSaskatoon.com
310 Wall St #209
Saskatoon, SK   S7K 1N7
Ph: 306.244.4150

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