You may remember the Barenaked Ladies song, If I had a $1,000,000, which was released in 1992. You would need about $1.85 million today to have the same buying power as then, depending on the inflation rate used in the calculation over the past almost 30 years. However, a million dollars today is still a […] Read more
Author Archives
What would you do if you had an extra million dollars?
‘What do you want’ can be difficult question to answer
It’ a simple enough question and one that gets asked many times a day. “What do you want” is usually addressed to another person or group of people in an attempt to try to find out what it is they desire or need. Young children have it mastered. They have no difficulty asking for what […] Read more
Farmers must decide their own comfort level with debt
Is your goal to be debt free? Do you think of debt as being a necessary evil? Any answer will be very much a function of personal opinion, with no wrong answers. I regularly talk to people who would very much like to be out of debt. In some situations, that is probably a good […] Read more
Financial records help to understand farm performance
I recently had a series of meetings that required quite a bit of driving and with that, windshield time to think. A lot of the work I do with farm families involves financial analysis, so I think about that a lot. I came to a very basic question. Why do farmers keep financial records? Even […] Read more
Financial statements help take a good look at farm profit
I would be in the group that believes that you shouldn’t try to manage by looking in the rear-view mirror. Farming is next year country. There is a lot about “next year” that we can, though, understand by examining past performance. We all have things that we would like to have had a second chance […] Read more
Transition Planning Forward takes changes to next steps
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or so the saying goes. There will be a great many of us that prefer the status quo. Change typically brings the unknown. We’ve not done that before. Or the other way of saying it … this is the way we’ve always done it. Some […] Read more
Conflicts of interest require people to act with integrity
I was talking to a farmer not that long ago about an issue he was dealing with. As I listened, it appeared that he had found himself caught between a rock and a hard place. We’ve all been there. As I thought about this though, it made me wonder where the saying came from. Apparently, […] Read more
Know which financial statement is best for your farm
This article is a follow-up to a previous article I wrote about farms and corporate financial statements. I commented that I am not an accountant but I am a management consultant who has some expertise and an interest in financial management. Through my career, I have gained some understanding of what accountants do in preparing […] Read more
The future is a vital component of farm succession planning
I read some statistics on farm succession planning the other day. It caused me to think about a conference on succession planning I attended in 1999. People and presenters quoted statistics about the average age of the Canadian farmer being about 57, if I remember correctly — something close to that anyway. There was also […] Read more
Capital turnover ratio declines
I recently spoke at a conference about financial efficiency. It was two sessions actually. I typically don’t get a lot of questions at the end of a presentation. Nor do I get a bunch of people coming up to me after I finish. That makes sense because I don’t think financial management is exciting for […] Read more
