Interest 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...
Read More
Debt is not a fun topic. Well, maybe it is if you like engaging in stories like those of the Four Yorkshiremen, later popularized by Monty Python, who sought to outdo each other with their personal histories of poverty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAdlkunflRs Poverty and debt are not, of course,...
Read More“Don’t even think about it.” That’s what I would like to say to anybody who is drawn to these funds due to their prodigious tax-saving opportunities. When I was working at a discount brokerage, there seemed to be regular inquiries about these products from people who...
Read MoreI 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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read MoreIf you are expecting a child to come into your home, you may already be thinking about how you can help support the cost of their post-secondary education. The cost of schooling seems to be consistently outpacing inflation. How can your child positively afford it?...
Read MoreMutual 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...
Read More
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...
Read MoreOne 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...
Read More