I occasionally participate in an online forum of retirees or near-retirees. Judging by the comments, many are suspicious of the Canada Pension Plan. It seems to boil down to three responses: The government is raiding our retirement nest egg – there will be nothing left...
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Living in Canada, it is almost impossible to ignore the United States. It is bigger than us in almost every way, except geography. Arguably, the U.S. has more influence over the world than any other nation and has maintained that influence for decades. The size, influence,...
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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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Beginning in the 1970s, my father got involved in investing in real estate in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley, mostly in Chilliwack, where I grew up. My wife and I owned our own home in Chilliwack from 1996 to 2003. We lived in it for all...
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There are two striking things about the returns of investment markets over the last decade or so. One is the consistently steady performance of the US stock market. Although not necessarily the top performing market every year, the US stock market has done very well...
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Norman Rothery’s Heated-Up Version of the Couch Potato Portfolio The Original Couch Potato Portfolio The original Couch Potato Portfolio came from a 1991 article by Scott Burns, then a writer at the Dallas Morning News. He advocated for a simple two-fund portfolio using index mutual funds. One...
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When my wife and I began investing, we did what is probably the most common thing that Canadians do, we went to our local bank branch, sat down with a financial advisor, and invested in a portfolio of mutual funds issued by that bank. We...
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Coping with the Uncertainty of Investment Returns Imagine that you have been putting away $10,000 at the beginning of each year from 2002 until 2019. For the sake of this example, taxes and commissions are excluded; you have been investing that money into the Canadian stock...
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An Introduction to Retirement Planning – Part 1 In the middle of this extraordinary COVID-19 pandemic, many of us may feel like we have been forcibly retired. Our governments have shut down large swaths of the economy in order to enable the physical distancing that, we...
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