In light of the recent story by CBC’s Marketplace (video, article) about the pressures bank employees face to meet sales targets, Canadians must become more vigilant when navigating financial products and services. I offer the following suggestions to help you protect your interests and ensure...
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The Canadian Retirement Dilemma As a matter of public policy, Canada has built several safety nets to help mitigate poverty for retirees. Among the most well-known are the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and Old Age Security (OAS). Lesser known, but available to lower-income Canadians is the...
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Norman Rothery, The Stingy Investor Norman Rothery of Stingy Investor fame, publisher of The Rothery Report, and frequent contributor to The Globe & Mail and the Canadian MoneySaver, provides a lot of free and paid resources. Among the free resources is his annual “Periodic Table” of...
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Last week, in my 224th blog post, I introduced Gregory (Greg) and Olivia, a young married couple who had bought a house in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). They considered two common ways to reduce the interest they would pay over the life of their...
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Recently, I’ve been thinking about saving versus investing or the idea of engaging in “risky” investments versus “safe” interest-bearing deposit products. This idea came to mind again because of the findings presented in my last blog post that financial planners in Japan did not tend...
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“Them’s fightin’ words!” Or so a character might say if I was writing a script for a 1950s Western. Nevertheless, some in the stock picker’s camp might take offence at the assertion in the title of this blog post. This seems to suggest that there...
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Your financial advisor isn’t dishonest; he’s just incompetent. That is the TL:DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) conclusion of a 2016 academic paper, “The Misguided Beliefs of Financial Advisors,” by Juhani T. Linnainmaa, Brian T. Melzer, and Alessandro Previtero. For many years, the common view of...
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I have been approached a couple of times to offer a second opinion on a person’s investments. I know what I do, but I wondered how “second opinion” is presented by financial institutions and their investment advisors. A quick search yielded several results, including an...
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It is a cliché that Canadians are loyal to their banks. While it is true that banks or credit unions are necessities of life, we do not need to stay loyal to one bank brand. In this blog post, I will discuss some ways in...
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Many Canadians have a reasonable degree of net worth. Millionaire households are not that unusual if you consider the value of housing, especially if you have been a homeowner for 20 years or more, which would be the case for many who are approaching retirement....
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