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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An Introduction to Insurance and Risk Management – Part 6 Doesn’t this Post Belong Under Investment Planning? While segregated funds are investment products, the fact that they have certain insurance features and can only be bought through someone who is life-insurance-licensed, I have placed this topic under...
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An Introduction to Insurance and Risk Management – Part 1 Wouldn’t you love to be a risk manager? It sounds like a job for the man or woman who gets great joy from being a party pooper. I suppose that might be true in some circumstances,...
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An Introduction to Investment Planning – Part 5.4 Diversification is one of the main benefits of mutual funds. With one purchase you can buy a piece of a wide variety of securities. Nevertheless, some mutual funds are quite narrowly focused and should probably be complemented by...
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An Introduction to Investment Planning – Part 5.2 Within my larger series on investment planning, this is the second post on mutual funds. Mutual funds are popular investment vehicles for investors because they give you instant diversification in a single purchase and they can be bought...
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