Weekend Reading: Crushing Car Payment Edition
I’ve written before about how buying new vehicles every few years can be a major wealth destroyer. Indeed, next to housing costs, a car payment (or two) can easily be your largest monthly expense. A recent Globe & Mail article (subs) by Rob Carrick caught my attention when he wrote the average monthly car payment…
Read MoreAn Evidence Based Investing Guide
In a world full of conflicts of interest and questionable information, I’d like to offer this evidence based investing guide to help you make informed choices with your money. What’s the point of investing, anyway? We invest our money for future consumption, with the idea that we’ll earn a higher rate of return from investing…
Read MoreHow To Plan Your Own Revenge Travel Year
Most of you know the story by now. The short version goes: I quit my job at the end of 2019 to focus full-time on financial planning and freelance writing. The underlying motivation was to have more time to travel. No longer bound by a set number of vacation days, and with work that could…
Read More5 Retirement Planning Options To Help You Reach Your Retirement Goals
There are lots of unknowns when it comes to retirement planning. Most of us focus on how much we need to save for retirement without giving much thought as to how much we’re going to spend in retirement. I’d say, in general, that most people want to maintain their existing lifestyle, if not enhance it…
Read MoreWeekend Reading: Mortgage Rate Limbo Edition
I mentioned we are building a new house, which we hope will be finished by spring 2023. It was a stressful time to sign a purchase agreement with a builder. We wanted to arrange our financing so that the new house purchase was not contingent on us selling our existing home (been there, done that,…
Read MoreShould You Postpone Retirement?
Many years ago, my boss (Jerry) was all set to retire at age 58 when the federal government decided to impose a tax on the distributions of income trusts and royalty trusts. He was heavily invested in the energy sector – in oil royalty trusts with a history of generous payouts thanks to years of…
Read MoreThe Retirement Risk Zone
I often recommend deferring CPP until age 70 to secure more lifetime income in retirement. It’s also possible to defer OAS to age 70 for a smaller, but still meaningful, increase in guaranteed income. While the goal is to design a more secure retirement, there can be a psychological hurdle for retirees to overcome. That…
Read MoreShould I Move My Investments When They’re Down?
Recent stock and bond market turmoil has many investors thinking about making changes to their portfolios. Indeed, mutual fund investors may be wondering whether it’s the right time to switch from their expensive financial advisor to a low-cost portfolio of index funds using a robo advisor or online brokerage. DIY investors may be pondering changes…
Read MoreWeekend Reading: The Power Of Anti-Goals Edition
The self-improvement market is estimated to be worth more than $10 billion in the U.S. and $40 billion globally. Indeed, there’s no shortage of books, blogs, and online courses designed to boost your productivity and life satisfaction. Hey, if morning routines, vision boards, and setting smart goals gets you motivated to make positive changes in…
Read MoreMental Accounting and How We Spend Money
We all have quirky behaviours when it comes to managing our money. One trick we fall victim to is called mental accounting. We separate our money into different types of mental accounts, with different rules, depending upon how we get it, how we spend it, and how it makes us feel. An easy example is…
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