What do franchises like Pizza Nova, M&M Meat Shops, Cora and Coffee Culture have in common?

They all have the ingredients to be financially successful.

In Canada, one out of every five dollars spent ends up in the cash register of a franchise operation.

That's more than $100 billion each year, proving savvy marketing, solid fiscal planning and some calculated risks are helping franchises prosper north of the 49th parallel.

When you're doing something you love, it seldom seems like work.

So it comes as no surprise that the majority of Canadian women polled in a recent survey say the main reason they want to start their own business is for the opportunity to do something they love.

BMO Bank of Montreal conducted a survey in recognition of International Women's Day that revealed that 36 per cent of women are interested in starting up their own businesses within the next decade.

With so many Canadians looking for work, it's not surprising scam artists are targeting people desperate to earn money through part-time work, such as mystery shopping.

The pitch starts out sounding legitimate, particularly to someone who's already struggling and may not be thinking that straight.

You answer an email or Kijiji post looking for part-time work. The scammer tells you that they're looking for mystery shoppers who can shop on their own time and earn a fee at the same time.

To get the ball rolling, the company will send you a cheque for as much as $4,000 to buy the items you need to purchase to appropriately rate the retail outlet, most likely a bank or payday loan service. 

The con artist's excuse for sending so much money is that they want you to take your fee out of the cheque. They then want you to wire the balance back to them so they can monitor things from their end.

You know, throughout the recession and this long, snarled recovery period much of the world’s still in, Canadians have kind of floated above the fray, our global reputation preceding us.

After all, tight banking regulations ensured our economic freefall wasn’t quite as severe as that of others, and, hey, look, they even took one of our top finance minds to be the world’s bank regulator.

Perhaps consumers, too, began to walk with a swagger. With recent news that Canadian household debt growth is at a ten year low, is there any doubting our fiscal responsibility?

Wellllll … hold on a tick. At the risk of a wrist injury from patting ourselves on the back, here’s a sobering stat (or two) sure to crash Canada’s cash conservatism to the ground.

In Japan, where husbands regularly hand over their entire salary to their wives, roughly three quarters of family finances are controlled by women who give their mates an allowance, BBC News reports.

47-year-old Taisaku Kubo, for instance, has been getting 50,000 yen a month (roughly $535) from his wife Yuriko for the past 15 years.

He's tried to negotiate a raise from time to time, but his wife isn't very sympasthtic: "She draws a pie chart of our household budget to explain why I can't get more pocket money," says Taisaku, whose stipend accounts for about 9% of the family's monthly budget.

And he's actually not doing that badly. According to Shinsei Bank which has been researching the trend for years, the average salaryman's monthly pocket money was 39,600 yen last year, down sharply from about 80,000 yen 20 years ago when Japan's economy was booming.

The majority of Canadians (76 per cent) would rather run their own business than work for someone else, according to recent Bank of Montreal research. And that number jumps to 82 per cent when you look at men only, BMO notes.

 In these days of economic uncertainty, starting your own business no longer seems all that much riskier than a 9-5 office job.

What's holding them back? No money. 52 per cent of those surveyed say access to capital is the most significant barrier to starting out on their own.

Despite this, about 1.7 million Canadian men consider themselves self-employed, according to Statistics Canada.

For most people, the funeral planning process is a mystery.

Pre-paying your funeral relieves your grieving loved ones from the burden of making the various decisions and choices that are required when someone dies. Good investment? Probably not. But you could be doing someone a favour nonetheless.

In most provinces, there are two ways to go. You can either buy an insurance policy that includes pre-paid funeral arrangements, in which case the insurance company will look after the costs. Alternatively, you can purchase pre-paid funeral arrangements directly from the funeral home.

Here are a few things to watch out for.

Family-owned businesses face unique issues — succession planning, marriages and divorces, complicated relationships — as well as the routine issues that come with being self employed.

The death of a business owner creates real challenges for the surviving family, however. The newly widowed faces the most dramatic upheaval possible on the home front and often assumes the new responsibility of running the family business.

Sometimes though, those left behind just want to cash out. Now, however, new wills legislation planned for Alberta could make passing family businesses on to the next generation a bit more difficult. 

In fact, changes to Alberta's Wills and Succession Act scheduled for 2012 could mean that some surviving spouses might end up with so much of the estate that a business cannot continue.