What is Longevity Risk? “Nothing is more difficult than retirement income planning.” I have heard or read variations of that phrase multiple times in the last few years. Why is it so difficult? After all, people are retiring every day in Canada. Hasn’t this been figured...
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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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My Initial Thoughts Way back in the 1980s, when I was younger … and the earth was still cooling … inflation was running hot. I had a small student loan at the time, about $5,000 as I recall. The interest rate on that loan was 13%....
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“But Statman says for some people that’s like telling an Orthodox Jew he should save money by buying cheaper cuts of pork and donate the extra money to the synagogue.” – Dan Bortolotti referring to Meir Statman in “More on socially responsible index investing.” This reference...
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After years of working at minimum wage retail jobs without benefits, Donald, age 59, is wondering what his strategy should be for retirement. He knows that he can begin taking the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) as early as next year, when he turns 60, but...
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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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One of the insights from behavioural finance is that we all benefit from systematizing and automating our financial behaviour. Set up your bill payments to come out of your bank account automatically, and you will never worry about missing your payments again. Sign up for...
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A man of my father’s generation once observed that young adults these days have an incredibly wide variety of career options available to them: computer and information technology, education, social services, publishing, film and TV production, travel and tourism, home construction and renovation, agriculture, etc....
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A few weeks ago, the news was suddenly filled with stories about “meme stocks,” in particular the US video game retailer GameStop Corp (GME). Followers of the Reddit community Wall Street Bets began buying up GME, causing a huge runup in the price, at least...
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