Are you looking for New Years Resolutions? If your ideas involve financial concerns, you have come to the right place. Below are nine different options to consider for 2023. All will require a bit of work to accomplish, but equally, all will leave you in...
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Each year the month of November is designated as Financial Literacy Month. I like to think that each blog post that I write adds to the financial literacy of my readers, but there is something to be said for a special focus on bringing up...
Read MoreDividends and Dates When I worked at a discount brokerage, I routinely fielded questions about dividends, in particular, the record date and the ex-dividend date (often abbreviated as “ex-date”). Investors would often get confused by these two dates and the impact they would have on their...
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The bucket strategy divides your investment assets into three categories. The Immediate or Short-Term Bucket This bucket covers a period lasting between two to five years. Money in this category is typically held in savings accounts, Guaranteed Investment Certificates (GICs), and Short-Term Fixed-Income (Bond) Funds. Assets in...
Read MoreInterest Rates and Borrowing, Including Mortgages In the last several months, we have begun to see home sales decrease and prices drop, largely due to an increase in interest rates. If you are planning to borrow money, whether for a mortgage or other purposes, this increase...
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I will admit to some trepidation in writing this blog post. Gordon Pape is one of the grand old men of investing in Canada. He has written a column for the Globe and Mail for more years than I can recall right now. However, like...
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While avoiding direct military engagement with Russian military forces, governments around the world have enacted a variety of sanctions that have significantly harmed Russia’s economic circumstances. Russia’s stock market has been closed since February 25, 2022. Russia has generally been included in emerging markets indices....
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In my student days, I remember an ethics professor saying something to the effect of, “That which is not prohibited is permitted.” Of course, one pithy sentence does not exactly provide the full range of nuance that was elaborated on over the semesters that I...
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As I wrote on my website, one of the major reasons I began to work in financial planning is because I saw multiple DIY portfolios that were not founded on any rational approach to investment planning. Many seemed to view investing as a variation on...
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Recently, a report from CIBC Capital Markets came out that parents gave their adult kids more than $10 billion to buy homes in the past year. For first-time young home buyers in Toronto, that bit of help averaged around $130,000. For those in Vancouver, the...
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