Meet Elaine Elaine was born and raised in B.C.’s Fraser Valley. Aside from the four years in Vancouver that she spent at university, she has spent her entire life there. She has never married or had children, so Elaine always felt she had to be prepared...
Read More
Saving for Retirement is Easy; Spending in Retirement – Not So Much You have been saving for retirement all your life. If you are a resident of Canada, you have been building up credits toward receiving Old Age Security (OAS). If you have been employed, you...
Read More
Meet Lee the DIY Investor Lee is a committed DIY investor who has been carefully building an investment portfolio over the years. His financial assets include a wide range of investments that he has assembled to meet his long-term goals. Like many DIY investors, though, Lee...
Read More
“Would it surprise you to know the number is $1.7 million?” You may be familiar with the commercial from Qtrade, the Vancouver-based online investment platform that partners with most of the credit unions in Canada. An interviewer asks a series of people on the streets what...
Read More
Jonathan Clements, author, founder and editor of the HumbleDollar blog, and former personal finance columnist at the Wall Street Journal, recently wrote of his diagnosis with metastasized lung cancer. He is not alone, of course. I’m sure that almost all of us can name a...
Read More
It was a typical Saturday morning at the local diner, where Lee, John, Dave, and Bob gathered for their usual breakfast and discussion about investments and the economy. This weekend, the hot topic was the recent decision by the Bank of Canada to reduce the...
Read More
Retire Now? I am fascinated by the number of videos that show up on YouTube extolling the virtues of early retirement. Often, they will have a catchy title like, “Why Wait? Retire Now!” or something similar. Oddly enough, despite the increasing interest in retiring early, trends...
Read More
Meet June and Jack, a Canadian couple in their mid-30s. They’ve been diligent about saving and investing, but as they sat down to review their Notices of Assessment from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), they were alarmed by the numbers they saw. Despite their best...
Read More
FPAC Pro Bono Planning I am a member of the Financial Planning Association of Canada™ (FPAC). Our mission is to build the practice of financial planning into a principled and client-centred profession. Among FPAC’s activities, such as advocacy before governments and regulators (I am a member...
Read More
Bank reputations are “in the toilet” The recent CBC Marketplace story on the sales culture inside the banks has proven to be a cautionary tale when it comes to using the banks for transacting in your financial business. As for the topic of this blog post,...
Read More