Investing

It’s hard to find a direct flight from Calgary to Dublin. WestJet offers one that leaves Calgary at 8pm and arrives in Dublin the next morning at 11am – a total flight time of eight hours. The problem was cost. A round-trip flight for our family of four was nearly $5,000. I decided to try…

With Robb on vacation, I am honoured to have the opportunity to guest post on Boomer and Echo and meet some new readers! For readers here who don’t know me, I’m the blogger behind MillionDollarJourney.com. In the early days (the blog started in 2006), I wrote quite a bit on the Smith Manoeuvre and continue…

Despite the odd blip over the last decade, Canadian and U.S. stocks continue to reach all-time highs. Investors are understandably worried about the next correction or crash. In particular, investors who are sitting on large amounts of cash are nervous about deploying their capital at today’s frothy valuations. Research has shown that, since stocks are…

A client asked me to send step-by-step instructions on how to transfer your RRSP to Wealthsimple. He’s moving his $145,000 portfolio from Primerica over to Wealthsimple’s robo-advisor platform to save on fees. My client’s existing “Asset Builder Fund” charges a management expense ratio (MER) of 2.30 percent – costing him $3,335 in fees each year.…

Canadian investors tend to suffer from home bias – a preference to hold more domestic stocks over foreign equities. This is actually true of investors in most countries, but it’s particularly troubling in Canada where our stock markets are highly concentrated in the financial and energy sectors. The federal government could be partially to blame…

Robo-advisors have been around for several years now offering affordable online investing services with an element of human advice. In general, investors who use a robo-advisor get assigned to a pre-packaged portfolio of low-cost exchange-traded funds (ETFs) based on their risk tolerance. Portfolios are regularly monitored and re-balanced whenever a client’s asset allocation drifts away…

We like to tackle our taxes early in the year, which means assessing last year’s tax situation quickly so we can take advantage of RRSP contributions in the first 60 days of the New Year. Here’s the quick and dirty tax situation for our household: Since I earn a salary at my day job we’ve…

When I got an activity tracker several years ago I was horrified to learn just how sedentary my lifestyle had become. I’d drive to work, park my butt at a desk for eight hours, drive home, park my butt on the couch for a few more hours, and go to bed. It was mindless laziness.…

**This is a review of CoPower Green Bonds** While cannabis stocks got much of the attention from investors this year, a different type of green investment is beginning to emerge in global markets. Green Bonds are used to fund environmental and climate-friendly projects such as renewables, energy efficiency, water efficiency, bioenergy, low carbon and green…

Who wants to give away their monies to government agencies? Raise your hand. Obviously there should be no hands going up right about now. The cliché is that you work hard for your money. You don’t want to give that money away, needlessly. As Canadians we can pay some very high tax rates on income…