Looking Professional on a Budget

By Jennifer and Andrea Kirby,
Kirby Financial Group  http://www.kirbyfinancialgroup.com/

Staying apace with fashion trends and living up to workplace fashion expectations can put a strain on any working woman’s budget.

We asked four Canadian women how they dress for success and their strategies for making their fashion dollars work for them.

Sandy Haney, Vancouver BC
Sandy Haney, communications manager at PrioNet Canada

doesn’t specify a clothing allowance, but estimates that she

spends $1200 - $1500 per year on clothing and shoes. Sandy

invests in nice fabrics and styles that don’t look dated. She buys

clothing that she can mix and match with different items in her

wardrobe.

Although dry cleaning can be expensive, Sandy opts for dress

slacks or pant suits or slacks with “jacket style” additions. Jackets

and pants can look professional at a fraction of the cost of a suit.

Pants also mean less money spent on nylons.

Sandy’s must-haves include comfortable but cute heels that work

with jeans or skirts, a cozy black sweater, and jewelry that can

embellish a simple top to make it work worthy or weekend friendly.

Barb Rallison, Calgary AB
For Barb Rallison, co-author of Slice (http://www.sliceofhealth.com/)

and owner of Vitamins First (http://www.vitaminsfirst.ca/), her

“business, very casual” clothing style at the store or at book

signings can still be a challenge. Barb limits her clothing shopping

to twice annual sprees or out of town shopping trips where she

might spend $1000 - $2000 at a shot.

Barb is conscious of buying durable items and quality fabrics

that will last for a long time, and typically turns to designer

names to find quality clothes. Although these designer items

cost more, Barb finds that she ends up buying fewer clothes

and they last longer. This fall, Barb is investing in stylish

wool-mix dress pants.

Although Barb doesn’t typically shop at consignment stores,

one local owner literally picks items with Barb in mind.

Otherwise, Barb finds it too time consuming to sift through the racks.

Tara Wickwire, Toronto ON

Tara Wickwire, who works in Public Relations for

Gap Inc. (http://www.gap.com/), stresses that her career in

retail lends itself to ongoing wardrobe updates from Gap,

Banana Republic and Old Navy’s latest collections. Tara spends

about $3000-$4000 annually including shoes and bags.

Although Gap’s dress code is casual, Tara’s interaction

with the media means that she is expected to adhere

to the latest trends. Tara says that most people are too

broad in building a work wardrobe. Instead, she suggests

starting with the absolute basics and injecting accessories

and colour for each season.

The trends for fall are indicating a season of classics.

A straight or slim cut suit with matching jacket and pencil

skirt, mixed with some bright, fine-knit cashmere sweaters

(cardigan, turtleneck, or v-neck), a crisp white shirt with

french cuffs, and a few silk novelty tops can be all you

need to look great at the office. Some of the other

fall wardrobe essentials include a great structured bag,

a pair of wide leg black pants, and a simple black pump.

Add some chunky jewelry, a silk scarf, a python or patent

belt and a pashmina, and you will suddenly find yourself

up-to-date!

Financing Fashion

Store credit cards can be tempting to use, but they

can also carry hefty interest charges, upwards of 28%!

None of the professional gals we interviewed used this

kind of plastic unless it offered an additional discount at

the store, and they insist on paying the balance immediately.

Lay-away plans seem to have lost favor for many Canadian

women, but this pay-before you bring it home system makes

a lot of sense for big-ticket items and can help avoid financing

charges if you don’t have the cash on hand.

If you find yourself bogged down by high-interest
store credit card debt, try Power Pay (https://powerpay.org/),

a website that helps people eliminate debt by paying it down

faster. The site also has great resources for household budgeting.

Tell us how you look fashionable on a budget!

Email Jennifer@kirbyfinancialgroup.com  or

Andrea@kirbyfinancialgroup.com

Jennifer Kirby is a Certified Financial Planner,

Chartered Life Underwriter and Registered Health

Underwriter with a passion for making sense out

of complex financial products. Jennifer has been

working in the financial planning industry since 1995

and has a proven track record for helping clients

clarify their personal and financial objectives.

Andrea Kirby has and MBA from Simon Fraser University

and joined Kirby Financial Group in 2007. Andrea is

dedicated to providing clients with candid, up-front

advice and excellent customer service.

Please contact us anytime if we can help you with your

financial planning.

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What Your Personal Dress Code Says About You

By Michelle Vandepol; Author of Mother Mexico

Dressing for success is less about the right cut of jacket and more about bringing an everyday polish to the package you are at work. You may not realize what your personal dress code says about you. Step back and examine yourself the way you think others would. Get a few photos snapped in work gear so you have a concrete idea of how you are presenting yourself beyond the hurried adjustments in the mirror in the morning.

We've all read the articles about the dos and don'ts of work wardrobe. That's old news. You're now moving on to going beyond the obvious ‘no no's' to incorporate both your goals and work philosophy in your ensemble. Didn't know it was possible? Read on.

A few guidelines are key. Keeping every outfit polished is overdressing in a positive way. You are going to look out of place wearing a suit in a jeans and t shirt zone but that doesn't give you a license to slop out. Making sure your jeans are a tailored fit, not too tight, and definitely not baggy; with a fitted t-shirt and blazer style jacket is a good kind of casual. You want to be the same level of dressed up or above as the clients coming into the business. It does not inspire their confidence to be handing their business over to someone who's dressed like the teenager running their child's day camp.

This is not to say corporate dress has to be devoid of all personality. It fact, some worker bees' work dress makeover should go the other way. Where they are trying too hard (which runs the same risks as trying too hard to be cool as a kid) to toe the line and wear safe things, they run the risk of becoming cubicle wallpaper. Staying in the safe zone does not mean dressing to be invisible. Stay modest and free from inflammatory political dress. The only possible exception could be a non-profit political climate. For most people, however, when working with the general public in an office setting; it is best to go with ‘non-offensive to all' style favorable to yourself.

Ask yourself where you are and where you want to go career wise? Does your style reflect it? For instance, whether you are working on attracting new roles to yourself or are bringing more authenticity to your workplace, those need different approaches. You can brainstorm to get what you want out of your existing wardrobe. Be free in your approach to new looks. Throw all the ideas out there. Spend some time with an unforgiving mirror and an idea of what someone with your dream job description would wear. Wear that. Some of your initial ideas might not work but you can trial run them before you go. Most experimentation should not be done on company time. You don't want your fashion don'ts to be the highlight of the Monday AM meeting. Wear your new work look out socially first if it's a far cry from what you normally do. Gauge reactions to it or see if it's as comfortable or as low maintenance as you first thought.

Being well dressed isn't a guarantee of plum assignments, but it can definitely be part of your game plan. You may have in the past underestimated how much dressing can impact your career. You may even feel irritated by it all: the marketing, the consumerism, and the minutiae of tights versus bare legs. You feel you have more important things to concern yourself with. While it is good to not get caught up in fashion vapidness even from a time efficiency perspective, it is naïve to write the matter of dressing off completely as you go about putting great effort into each of your other parts of work.

Small things really do make a difference. Putting a bit of funk into the corporate uniform that looks nothing like the punk princess that you are on the weekend makes sense. It brings you fully to the job. That said, there needs to be a bit of a boundary. Not that your work and play wardrobes can't have overlap, but it's probably not a bad idea to have others be able to tell if it's a day on or a day off. If you are meeting clients on the weekend or after-hours as well - this may be more common if you're self employed and work seeps into a lot of your life - it's a good idea to dress up a bit for all of life.

Wardrobe can play helpful assistant to other parts of your life too. If you are having a hard time drawing the line between workplace and your front door and you are an employee who needs work balance defined, having something else to change into after the commute can make all the difference. It does not need to be a drastically different look, but one that tells you that the shift has changed. Just like you would limit a personal call at work, you are now limiting work to a few sketched ideas at home. This weekend make the work you bring home a fashion magazine and a notepad and see if you can't launch into that fabulous new position with the look that goes with it.

Making the choice: Back to work or Back to School?

By Michelle Vandepol; Author of Mother Mexico.

It isn't just your kids or the neighbors' who are going back to school. Many adults are retraining for the challenges of today's work force. You might be on your maternity leave or are approaching yours. Maybe you are coming back into the work world after a few years of focusing exclusively on home or are burning out in your current position. You thought that there was one main focus: when to go back to work and how long to stay. But you are realizing that today's job climate has shifted. It might not be so bad to have multiple options at the ready. The choice has expanded to be back to work or back to school?

Deciding on your next move does not have to be strenuous. Make it simple the old fashioned way. Do the pros and cons thing, putting pencil to paper and mapping all the options out. Use those spider diagrams, engage the brainstorming, and watch what happens. You may find out quite quickly what it is you really want. Informally polling your friends is an easy helpful way to get insights and how to tips at the same time. Ask people who have done back to school or back to work or even those who have done them at the same time. Ask what would they do differently knowing know what they didn't know then. You can benefit from their experience. Take notes over coffee.

Creativity in thinking and flexibility in planning can help you. Take pieces of each advice or story that appeal to you, or you think would be an asset to streamlining your life, or fulfilling a need, and leave the rest. Think about how to tailor-make your leave and return to the workforce to make it ideal for you. You want to make it as efficient a transition as possible.

You need to really evaluate what you want. Is it satisfaction in your job of choice in your ideal line of work? Is it less important what you do and more important to have your job be the supporting role to your life? Only you know. Spend some time figuring it out. Factors coming into play are most likely finances, time, support, desire, and child care availability. Think of how your choices will affect your lifestyle both now and later. How will a student loan affect your finances? How will you feel if you are still in this organization or field a decade from now? How long will your transition be? What can you do to make things easier on yourself?

A change is as good as rest they say. What have you been doing lately? Change it up. If you felt burnt out prior to your workplace leave, consider doing the opposite to what you were doing. Making your choice an even more positive experience is all in the day to day attitude. The buzzword is acceptance. Acceptance of your life as is, flaws and all; and acceptance of your limitations on your to do list and your dreams. (not in scope but in how fast you can live life and pursue them) There will always be another day in which to do what it was that was left behind yesterday. And if there isn't, you don't want to have lived only in search of something you are never attaining. Let life catch up to you. Prioritize and figure out how to enjoy your life and search for what is most important even while following the step by step everyday work.

Chip away at your goals. Be realistic, but optimistic: believing the best is possible, but planning enough to get you out of the worst case scenario. Use common sense. Sometimes the timing is off to do what you really want and it will be there in a couple of years.

Whatever you choose, work or school, commit to one or the other for a pre-set length of time. Avoid impulsive switches back and forth. They will cause interruptions in daycare and your work record that might be hard to overcome later. Take care of your business to do with enthusiasm and a realization of what is enough both in commitment and effort and have fun tackling something new.

Ingenious Diaper Bags

I've just found the perfect diaper bag. It's fabulously chic, totally practical, perfect for traveling and costs just over $200.  I can almost hear my mom's voice…"Are you out of your mind? You're going to spend $200 on a bag to carry a few diapers in? What's wrong with using a plastic grocery bag like I did?"

What can I say? She has a point. Just about any bag will work as a diaper bag.  I countered with "Mom, I could never use plastic. It's just so not green." 

I have to admit (although never to my mom) that my current diaper bag is really just a big bag with a couple of zippered pockets. It works beautifully, holds everything, and costs less than $40. It's really just meant to be a temporary replacement for my first one, which I was forced to bid adieu to after it fell into an airplane toilet. Yes, you read right.  There I was trying to change the baby in a place where there is no room to change a baby. Holding the baby with one hand, I was trying to spread out the changing pad and take out the diapers and wipes with the other. I was holding the bag between my stomach and the change table, and… SPLASH. Thankfully it was at the end of a flight because I was not about to salvage that bag.

So all this got me thinking. My company, Wee Travel Baby Equipment Rentals, makes it easier for parents to travel lighter by providing a full range of the latest and greatest in baby gear. Could there possibly be a mom out there who invented a diaper bag that makes it easy to change a baby in a public washroom?

And so the search began for something hip, functional, and brilliantly engineered. And that's when I found ‘my cherie amour' - the Studio Cherie diaper bag - an ingenious little thing that I adore (but don't yet own because the apple doesn't fall far from the tree and I'm having trouble justifying the $200).

What's so great, you ask? The Studio Cherie diaper bag was designed to make it easy to change your baby in the washroom of an airplane. The back side of the bag opens up to become a changing pad that is designed to fully cover the changing table. When you open the changing pad, your wipes, plastic bag pocket and diapers are at your fingertips. And the thing that I love the best - there's no way the diaper bag is going to fall into the toilet when  your baby is lying on the changing pad!

I also came across the gr8x Baby Traveller Deluxe Diaper Bag which is a diaper bag and baby changing station all in one. Ok - function over fashion here, but it's pretty clever. It has 3 layers of pockets that hold everything you need for changing, and it's perfect for parents who want a lightweight, practical and organized diaper bag. There's not a whole lot of room for extra stuff, but I could definitely see keeping one of these in the car, or bringing it in my airplane carry-on bag.

Finally, because your man may not be too keen on carrying the gorgeous girly girl diaper bag you've just spent a fortune on, there is the DadGear Diaper Vest. Just as the name implies, this is essentially a wearable diaper bag - perfect for the dad who won't be caught carrying anything that even remotely resembles a purse. The vest has strategically placed pockets for all of the baby-care essentials that a diaper bag would hold, including a changing pad hidden in the back. All in all, not a bad idea, but where do you "wear" the dirty diapers?

About the author: Lesley Cherry is co-founder of Wee Travel Inc. Baby Equipment Rentals, weetravel.ca, serving Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria. Check out her hip baby gear blog www.weetravel.ca/blog to read about more great travel gear for parents on the go