Finance
For travel-loving Canadians, other financial goals take a back seat to vacation spending
Liza Akhvledziani Carew and her husband David Carew visited Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve on their honeymoon. The couple strategically use credit card points to help pay for their travel.Supplied
Driving through rolling savannah plains in Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve on her honeymoon, Liza Akhvledziani Carew saw elephants, lions and giraffes. She was reminded of the sheer vastness of the world and felt her “own little life” put into context.
For Ms. Akhvledziani Carew, the chief executive officer of a startup that helps Canadians earn more credit card points, travel is a non-negotiable budget item.
“It’s a big part of our lifestyle. That’s probably what I would spend most of my money on,” she said, adding that the couple pays for part of their travel with a “sophisticated [credit card reward] points strategy.”
The cost of travelling has soared in recent years, driven by the postpandemic travel boom, inflation and new taxes imposed by destinations affected by overtourism.
But for many Canadians, travel remains a high-priority spending area, regardless of rising costs. And it’s clashing with other financial goals.
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Kathleen Daunt, a financial adviser with the New School of Finance in Toronto, works with clients who are saving for a major financial milestone, most commonly to buy a home.
When she sits down with her clients and calculates the amount they’d need to save each month to reach that goal – which usually means not spending on travel – they balk at the trade-off.
“People expect to have all the items on their list of priorities. If anything, it means you have to understand your priorities and have flexibility,” she said.
She also said roughly two in five new clients will cite annual travel as one of their top financial goals.
Ms. Daunt said she sees the desire for travel as a mix of social media-induced fear of missing out, widespread burnout and a societal view of vacations as a right – all of which can make it easier to justify overspending.
“You have that same old expectation [of being able to take vacations] but everything just feels more pricey,” she said. “It’s so much money for a family of four or more to do an on-a-plane vacation.”
Canadians’ overseas trips were up 32 per cent in the July-to-September period last year from the same period a year earlier, and up 6.5 per cent from 2019, according to Statistics Canada’s most recent national travel survey. The amount they spent abroad also jumped, rising 20 per cent in 2024 from a year earlier and nearly 40 per cent from 2019.
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Even the trade war with the United States and growing possibility of a recession have not dimmed Canadians’ vacation ambitions. While travel south of the border by plane and car is down, Transat A.T. Inc. chief executive officer Annick Guerard said on a conference call with analysts in March that Canadians’ spending on transatlantic flights has not been affected.
According to estimates by Barry Choi, a personal finance and travel expert at moneywehave.com and regular Globe and Mail contributor, a two-week European vacation costs about US$5,050 ($7,000), though he noted the estimate was for a solo traveller, so couples or families should expect to pay notably more. Timing can significantly affect costs, with June to August the most expensive months.
In contrast, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., Canadians’ average monthly mortgage payment at the end of 2024 was $2,042 (and much higher in Toronto, at $3,006, and Vancouver, at $3,053).
Rachel Dodds, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Ted Rogers School of Hospitality and Tourism Management who studies overtourism and consumer motivations for travel, said social media plays a huge role in stoking travel interest. According to data from TikTok, as of mid-2024 the app had seen a 410-per-cent increase in travel content views since 2021.
“Everyone has a phone, everyone consumes [travel content] – if you see a reel on Instagram you’re like, ‘Oh, I wanna go there,’” Prof. Dodds said. That goes both ways: While on vacation, people are much more likely to post photos for the “instant gratification” of likes and comments. “There’s an emotional and sharing aspect of it that didn’t exist before 15 years ago.”
Relative to previous decades, travelling is now more affordable and is seen as a right rather than a privilege in Western countries, Prof. Dodds said. And that increase in affordability has come at a time when many people, particularly millennials and Gen Zers, have more disposable income but feel other large financial goals are out of reach.
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“Travel has become a substitute for those kinds of things,” she said.
Prof. Dodds said we are an increasingly lonely society, and many people are travelling to connect with others to have meaningful, authentic experiences of other cultures. That’s given rise to sustainable travel, and nature-based trips and community experiences, rather than the traditional resort-based vacations.
While Ms. Daunt said none of her clients have ultimately chosen travelling over other financial goals, some have opted to delay major purchases. She said she usually sees people negotiating within their new budgets to downgrade from a trip every year to once every two or three years, or from pricier international trips to smaller ones close to home.
“It’s hard, because we have the push from feeling burnt out and I would argue expecting vacations. We live in a country where we feel like, ‘I deserve to be able to have vacations,’ and there’s this other push on the home-buying side where there’s so much FOMO when it comes to home purchasing despite a bonkers overpriced market,” she said. “We’re still putting those expectations on ourselves.”
A strategy of making small regular contributions to a dedicated travel savings account can be an effective way to save for vacations without compromising other travel goals, she said.
For Ms. Akhvledziani Carew’s part, when she and her husband bought their home a few years ago after years of rigorous monthly savings goals that mimicked what they expected to spend on mortgage payments.
They also tapped their investments, and her husband sold a condo he previously owned. She said they did slightly less-elaborate trips, but their points strategy meant they didn’t have to cut back much.
“It was a different position we were starting from,” she acknowledged, but added later “you build your lifestyle around the thing that’s most important to you.”
00:00 Speaker A
We are cranking it up a few extra gears with Stock of the Week. I’m locked in on Netflix ahead of its July 17th earnings report. What’s caught my attention is that the stock has been underperforming the broader market rally this month. Shares are down five and a half percent in July while the S&P 500 is up 1.7%. Judging by the Wall Street commentary out there, analysts aren’t making too much of this trend divergence though. Needham analyst, Laura Martin, is out today raising her target price on Netflix to $1500 from $1126. She says she remains impressed with Netflix’s global scale and stable content spending. Jumping into the Yahoo Finance platform, you can see Martin isn’t alone in her bullishness. The street has hiked its 2025 EPS estimate on Netflix by 79 cents compared to just 90 days ago. They have also lifted their 2026 EPS estimate by 60 cents during that same time span. Still with me, my round table Larry Tenterelli, Steve Sosnick, and Inez Ferre. Uh, Inez, I want to go to you here on Netflix out of the jump. Netflix, I can understand why these estimates have climbed. Really for the better part of two years, Netflix has come out here and they have completely destroyed, crushed, hammered, however you want to put it, earnings estimates, and they have come out and raised guidance. I’m trying to think, why won’t that happen again, given how popular the platform is?
02:24 Inez Ferre
Well, certainly you have a lot of Wall Street that believes that they can continue to outperform as a company. I mean, they’ve had their password share crackdown. They’ve had their ad tiers that has done very well. They are pushing into live sports. So there’s a lot of reasons why the street is bullish on the stock that and you mentioned the sort of underperformance this week, but look, if you take a look at a year to date chart and you take a look at where it’s come from the April lows, you have Seaport Global that has been that noted this when they actually lowered their rating to neutral because they said, “It’s a lot that’s baked into the stock right now. And on evaluation standpoint, they’re saying, let’s just wait to for for management to execute on everything that is now priced into the share into these shares because they’ve gone up since those April lows, almost 50%.”
04:01 Speaker A
Larry, let me get over to you here. The stock has underperformed in July. Any concern or red flag on your part there ahead of earnings?
04:24 Larry Tenterelli
No, that’s part of the rotation that I discussed that started on July 1st. The chart that you just put up showed a sharp pullback in Netflix on July 1st. And we saw that with quite a few of the high momentum stocks and money moved into small caps, healthcare, home builders. And I I think it’s a normal sector rotation. Fund managers have made a lot of money this year in tech and some of these growth stocks. And I think it’s a normal rotation to book some gains and then reallocate into underperformers. Netflix is a very strong long-term uptrend. It could always consolidate after nearly a 50% move off the lows, but the long-term trend is very strong.
05:20 Speaker A
Hey Larry, that’s what I’m trying to get at. Is it, is the stock become so priced for perfection? Even if Netflix comes out again, beats on earnings, maybe the street’s just continue to inclined to sell this name.
05:37 Larry Tenterelli
That’s possible. There there’s a lot of gains in a stock like Netflix that could be booked. So as a trend follower, I’m going to stay with the weekly trend, which is strong, but a lot of these stocks have had big run-ups. So if there was some profit taking into earnings or after earnings, as long as they stay over the 50-day moving average, it really wouldn’t concern me.
06:04 Speaker A
Steve, last word to you. Is Netflix perhaps one of the most perfect stocks in the market? Uh, they had Squid Games, the finale drop at the end of the quarter. This is going to be the first full quarter where they raise prices on folks. So their profit should look pretty good. And oh yeah, there’s no tariff exposure.
06:39 Steve Sosnick
Oh, it’s certainly been a beneficiary for all the reasons you’ve suggested and both and Inez and Larry both made great points about like the the year-to-date performance and also sort of the um, end of the second quarter markup fading uh, at the as of the 1st of July. Um, but I do think, you know, it’s proven to be a very price inelastic stock. I know that I’ve tried to cancel it and my wife and kids have revolted every time I try. Can’t cancel Netflix, Steve. What are you doing, man?
07:39 Steve Sosnick
I don’t watch it. My family does. I watch other stuff. I watch more sports than Netflix, but what ends up happening is they they they rebelled and said, “Absolutely not.” And so I think they’re, you know, this company, every time they’ve tried to do something that people thought might scare off customers, it hasn’t. The question now is, is it priced, is it priced to perfection, or is it priced beyond perfection? Uh, the trends are certainly very strong. Um, it’s been a great company and the, you know, but but as with many things market-related, have we gotten we’ll find out when the earnings come out if we’ve gotten a bit ahead of our skis, um, in terms of expecting another round of perfection. But boy, the market since the last earnings, uh, the market’s really repriced this stock in a very positive way.
Finance
Ex-Google and Meta Engineers Launch Nauma: Personalized Financial Planning Tools for Tech Professionals
SAN FRANCISCO, July 10, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — A team of former Google and Meta engineers has launched Nauma, a new platform designed to help people working in tech navigate complex financial decisions with confidence. Nauma’s mission is to democratize fiduciary-quality financial guidance, providing highly personalized planning tools without the high costs of traditional financial advisors.
Today, most high-net-worth families rely on advisors who charge based on Assets Under Management (AUM)—typically 1% of a client’s assets each year. For a family with $5 million, that means paying $50,000 annually, even as the level of service often remains static. Worse, these fees tend to rise 6–8% per year as portfolios grow, creating a system where costs scale without a proportional increase in value.
“The AUM model is outdated and misaligned with clients’ best interests,” said Alex Sukhanov, co-founder of Nauma. “Advisors operating under this model are incentivized to keep assets under their control, which can lead to biased advice when clients actually want to use their money—to buy real estate, start a business, or donate to charity.
Nauma is designed to give tech professionals clarity and control over their financial lives. The platform addresses the complex challenges faced by this group, including optimizing taxes, managing equity compensation, planning for early retirement, and protecting generational wealth.
“Tech professionals are building substantial wealth earlier in their lives, but most tools and advisors aren’t designed for their unique needs,” said Simone, Nauma’s co-founder. “We’re building the modern, intelligent financial planning infrastructure we wish we had—one that puts people, not assets, first.”
For more information, visit https://nauma.ai
About Nauma
Founded by ex-Google and Meta engineers, Nauma provides advanced financial planning tools tailored for people working in tech. By replacing the legacy AUM fee model with scalable, technology-driven solutions, Nauma empowers users to navigate complex financial decisions and build wealth on their own terms.
Media Contact
hello@nauma.ai
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/74982a9a-7d84-4a5c-8e07-edb337b65345
Finance
Mark J. Epley Joins SEDA Experts, Bringing Decades of Corporate Finance, Leveraged Finance, and M&A Expertise
SEDA Experts LLC, a leading expert witness firm providing world-class financial expert witness services, announced today that Mark J. Epley joined the firm as Managing Director.
New York, NY, July 08, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — “Mark brings exceptional knowledge of corporate finance to our franchise,” said Peter Selman, Managing Partner of SEDA Experts.
Mark Epley is a seasoned investment banking executive with over 30 years of experience in corporate finance, leveraged finance, and M&A. He served as Chairman of the Financial Sponsors Group Americas at HSBC Securities, where he led global coverage teams and delivered significant growth. Mark has also held senior leadership roles at other global franchises including Nomura, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley.
At HSBC, Mark built and grew the Americas Financial Sponsors Group. He managed coverage for premier clients such as Blackstone, Apollo, BlackRock, Carlyle, Bain Capital, TPG, and Warburg Pincus. Additionally, Mark contributed strategically as a member of HSBC’s Americas Investment Banking Division Management Committee, influencing firm-wide strategy and talent recruitment.
Prior to HSBC, Mark co-founded the Americas Investment Banking Division at Nomura Securities International and held roles as Global Head of the Financial Sponsors Group and Co-head of Corporate Finance Americas. He led a global team of 80 bankers across five offices, and was an active member of Nomura’s Global Investment Banking Division Executive Committee. Mark joined Nomura from Deutsche Bank Securities where he also served as Global Head of the Financial Sponsors Group,
Mark began his career at Morgan Stanley & Company, where he was Executive Director and founded the middle market coverage effort within the Financial Sponsors Group. He managed over 100 equity capital markets transactions, including IPOs, follow-ons, convertible bonds, and spin-offs. He was also involved in Mergers & Acquisitions and Restructuring transactions. His career started at a predecessor firm to JP Morgan, Manufacturers Hanover Trust (MHT), focusing on credit analysis and corporate coverage.
Mark presently acts as a Senior Advisor to SQ Capital supporting the origination and build at a unique and differentiated fund focused on investing in Private Equity secondary transactions.
Mark holds an MBA in Finance from Columbia Business School, where he earned Dean’s List honors, and a BA in Politics from Princeton University. He has also completed executive education programs in Energy Innovation & Emerging Technologies at Stanford University and Strategic Wealth Management at Columbia University.
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