I will admit to a bit of a love-hate relationship with life insurance. On the one hand, insurance is almost always appropriate to buy at some time in your life. On the other hand, as someone with a chronic health condition, kidney disease, I couldn’t...
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In years gone by, many people sought a job that would provide the proverbial “gold-plated” pension plan, by which was meant a defined benefit pension, what one might refer to as a “true” pension. That is, once you retired, you would get guaranteed, possibly inflation-protected,...
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As sure as the snow will inevitably melt away in the spring, so will a portion of our income as it is paid to the Canada Revenue Agency. Many employed people will have overpaid their income taxes in the course of the year and are...
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Shortly after I turned 25, and was newly married, I discovered I had a chronic kidney disease that would almost certainly lead to kidney failure. Somehow kidney failure was delayed a lot longer than the prognosis originally indicated, but in 2014 my kidney function got...
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“Why not both?” This is the answer the wife gives to her husband when he asks whether they should install an indoor or an outdoor hot tub. Perhaps you recall that commercial from one of the major providers of reverse mortgages in Canada. While the...
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Everybody wants to be in on the ground floor of THE NEXT BIG THING. They want to be an employee of the next Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft, when those companies were in their start-up phase, and be granted stock options that will grow from zero...
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In a few days, my oldest child will get married. There are at least two consequences of this impending event: 1. I will take a break from writing a blog post next week. 2. This blog post. There are certainly more consequences that are much more...
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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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At the end of 2020, the fathers of two friends and an uncle of mine died. For none of them was death unexpected. Two were over 100 and the other was 90. Even when death is expected, though, the loss of a loved one brings...
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Psychological analysis of people’s relationships with money has become an increasingly important area for financial planning. The tendency in financial services has been to view such matters as having to do only with products. For paying bills and daily expenses, you need a chequing account. To...
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