After years of working at minimum wage retail jobs without benefits, Donald, age 59, is wondering what his strategy should be for retirement. He knows that he can begin taking the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) as early as next year, when he turns 60, but...
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Mutual Funds Often Have a Cost Disadvantage In my previous post, I wrote about several advantages of investing with mutual funds. That post invited a few comments about the costs of mutual funds outweighing the behavioural advantages. Although there are a relatively few mutual funds that...
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Mutual funds do not get a lot of love, even though they hold the lion’s share of retail investors’ assets in Canada. If you are like me and often peruse personal finance pages of the major Canadian newspapers (or more accurately, their websites), you will...
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Employed: Defined Contribution Registered Pension Plan Let’s suppose the following scenario: You are in your mid-40s and have worked for one employer for the entirety of your working career. Throughout, your employer had provided its employees a defined contribution registered pension plan which was based on...
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Probating a will sounds uncomfortable, doesn't it? Kind of like the legal equivalent of a doctor giving you a thorough physical exam… Perhaps there is something to that analogy. Although simple, small estates with a single heir may not require probating, the probate process has value...
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One of the insights from behavioural finance is that we all benefit from systematizing and automating our financial behaviour. Set up your bill payments to come out of your bank account automatically, and you will never worry about missing your payments again. Sign up for...
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You have saved steadily throughout your career. You have a Defined Contribution Pension Plan from work, a Locked-In Retirement Account from a previous employer pension, a Registered Retirement Savings Plan, and a Tax-Free Savings Account. You have arrived at the point of retirement. How are...
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In earlier years, the incentives to begin your Canada Pension Plan (CPP) payments at 60 made more sense. However, a few years ago, the Federal government created a compelling incentive to delay taking CPP. First, for each month before age 65 that you begin receiving...
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A man of my father’s generation once observed that young adults these days have an incredibly wide variety of career options available to them: computer and information technology, education, social services, publishing, film and TV production, travel and tourism, home construction and renovation, agriculture, etc....
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A few weeks ago, the news was suddenly filled with stories about “meme stocks,” in particular the US video game retailer GameStop Corp (GME). Followers of the Reddit community Wall Street Bets began buying up GME, causing a huge runup in the price, at least...
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