If you find yourself with clients who are cash-strapped, debt-burdened and unable to save, you certainly have plenty of company.

That’s because more than half of Canadians (57%) can’t meet their savings goals; and almost as many (51%) are intimidated by the thought of setting up “a pay yourself first” savings program, suggests a recent Royal Bank of Canada poll.

Given these results, RBC’s main recommendation is to encourage your clients to set up a “pay yourself first” automated savings solution. In fact, two decades after David Chilton’s The Wealthy Barber became an investment classic touting just that strategy, the country’s largest bank insists this strategy remains the best way for the savings-challenged to get ahead.

“To be quite frank, it is as simple as that. And it really can be that easy,” says Maria Contreras, RBC’s product manager, savings accounts, who adds that she was not surprised about the survey’s main finding that one in two Canadians can’t or won’t save as much as they would like to. “Everybody is challenged. There are so many demands on our finances these days, with expenses going up and so many more things that we want to purchase.”

The same survey found that almost four in 10 (38%) said they were unable to save anything because they had nothing left after paying off expenses or, for a smaller group, because of impulse spending. Many Canadians may be “hard-wired” to spend, says Contreras — which is no surprise, given the daily bombardment of advertising that people face and the profusion of “no money down” retail pitches. “If you have money left over at the end of the month in your account,” she says, “you are going to spend it.”

A recent report from Bank of Montreal’s Retirement Institute echoes this theme, having found that Canadians in general aren’t saving because of factors that can be characterized as either too much temptation to buy things today on the one hand, or a paralyzing amount of information about saving and retirement planning on the other.

“People tend to place less value on a reward in the future than a benefit today,” the BMO report states. “This tendency to discount the future benefit encourages procrastination and explains, in part, why people use credit cards, yet fail to save for retirement.”

Breaking people out of that “live for today” cycle is not easy, says Brian Poncelet, an independent certified financial planner in Oakville, Ont. He finds that telling his clients the grim news that they don’t have enough savings to fund a comfortable retirement rarely hits home. Instead, he prefers to have clients work through the retirement calculations on their own and plug in their own rate-of-return estimates and other variables.

“You only have to let them come to their own conclusion rather than telling them they are screwed,” he says. “Once they go over the numbers themselves, which the vast majority of people have never done, it’s pretty scary.”

Poncelet says the “calculate it yourself” strategy “helps,” but often is not enough — especially with the average lifespan continuing to lengthen. “We can always save more,” he says. “It’s like [extra] fuel on a plane. I would rather have more fuel on a plane so that if we have to be up in the air longer, we can work with it — as opposed to just having enough.”

The RBC survey of 1,121 Canadians, which was conducted in August, found that most people have not switched back to saving mode following the recession. One-third of respondents reported that they make regular contributions to a savings account and 29% save “from time to time.”

The main reasons for saving were to create and emergency fund (47%) and to pay for vacations or travel (35%). The reasons varied by age, though, as vacations, home and auto purchases dominated the savings goals of younger respondents.

In the end, says Myron Knodel, director of tax and estate planning with Winnipeg-based Investors Group Inc., there is no “one size fits all” strategy to motivate clients to save more or eliminate debt.

“Try to determine what is an area that is important to this person,” he suggests, “and where is the message going to resonate the best. And then use that message.”

For some clients, that trigger is dealing with the fear of not having enough money set aside for 20 years from now; for others, it is the satisfaction of watching their net worth steadily increase.

Knodel adds that with many clients, expensive debt, such as that incurred from credit cards, is often a problem. He favours consolidating debts into one debt with a lower interest rate, with a specific plan to whittle it down. IE