My dad sat me down and showed me how to buy my first stock not long after I finished high school. He made sure I had both a TFSA and a non-registered account before I really understood what either one was for. Most people never get that.
The hardest part of money is that nobody explains it plainly — so that's what I do.
Nobody is born knowing this. I just got taught early.
I'm the person you call when the spreadsheet stops being the hard part.
Most of my clients don't arrive with a math problem. They arrive at a moment — a job offer with a pension attached, a layoff with severance and company shares and a workplace RRSP all tangled together. A first house, a new baby, a business that's finally making money, a birthday that made retirement feel suddenly real.
Those moments come with numbers and with feelings, and you don't get to deal with one without the other. I'm here for both. We'll talk through the hard math, and we'll talk through the part where you're not sure if you're allowed to want what you want.
Hi, I'm Cassie
And what I'll never do: sell you a product, earn a commission on your decision, or make you feel like you should have known that already. I'm advice-only. You're the only person paying me, which makes you the only person I answer to.
What that can look like in practice...
Get from "I think I should be investing?" to a plan you can explain out loud
investing
Budget for the once-in-a-lifetime trip without quietly wrecking everything else
vacations + travel
Set up an RESP and actually understand the options instead of picking one at random
RESP
Work out whether a career change was financially survivable, then make it survivable
CAREER CHANGE
with a lot of moving parts — severance, company shares, a workplace RRSP, and a hard deadline to decide
Navigate a layoff
"Financial independence doesn't have to mean retiring early. It means your options belong to you."
Being a financial planner checks every box for me. I love the work, I'm a huge numbers nerd, and honestly I get at least as much excitement out of my clients' wins as I do out of my own.
I have two young kids (3 & 7 at the time of writing), a husband and my sweet dog, Lucy who is confident she's famous — she gets enough attention from strangers to support the theory. We LOVE camping, though I'll be honest and say we have a pretty nice camper, so it’s the comfortable kind of camping that's really more of a travel/vacation combo. We've recently gotten into mountain biking, we hike, wander through museums, take beach days, and see new places as a family. Being able to meet clients over video calls gives us the freedom to be able to work from anywhere so we get to see and do so much.
I did this for myself for years before I did it for a living.
HOW I GOT HERE
I've completed and passed every course in the Qualified Associate Financial Planner (QAFP) program, with the Certified Financial Planner (CFP) designation next. (Side note: the financial industry seems to be quite obsessed in making more and more acronyms,there are so very many....)
The designations matter, but they confirmed something I'd already been doing for twenty years — I just wanted to do it properly for other people.
My dad taught me to choose and buy my first stock shortly after high school, made sure I had a TFSA and a non-registered account, and kept teaching me for years afterward. It handed me two decades of compounding and a vocabulary most people are simply never given. I know that was luck rather than anything I earned, and it's the thing that shaped how I work: the gap was never intelligence, it's who got taught. I don't think less of anyone arriving at forty-two with no idea where to begin.
Investing is only one part of financial planning, though, and I wanted the rest of it — how much a person actually needs, where the tax efficiencies are hiding, how the pieces fit together over a whole lifetime. Financial independence was the rabbit hole that got me there. FIRE, if you know it. It's a whole thing, with good strategies out there and some not-so-great ones, but the core idea holds up: independence isn't really about retiring early. It's about your options belonging to you.
a. Facebook
b. TikTok
c. Instagram
d. YouTube
07. Your favorite place to show up online?
a. Fishing/Camping along the Essiequibo River
b. Night Scuba Diving with Manta Rays
c. Traveling across SE Africa solo
d. Mountain Biking in Fernie
06. What’s the most adventurous thing you've ever done?
Coffee and minimal conversation until the caffeine de-zombifies me
05. The morning ritual you swear by?
My mom
04. The one thing you'd be lost without?
a. Video Light
b. Lego Minifigures
c. Chocolate Stash
d. Laptop
03. What's your favourite thing on your desk?
Americano Misto
02. Your go-to coffee or tea order
a. Mountain biking with my fam
b. Anything by (or in) the ocean
c. Reading in a sunny place
d. Any of the Above
01. Where we’ll find you off the clock
