If I’m being honest with myself, I have to admit to not being the most energetic guy in the world. If something really interests me, and captures my imagination, I will work on it night and day, and it will consume my thoughts. However, if it’s something I have to do, but I’m not really interested in doing, boy, do I struggle. My mind wanders, and the effort exhausts me. For a lot of my life I compared myself to far-more-energetic friends who seemed to navigate their world with rockets strapped to their ass. Always running here and there, pursuing one interest after the other, never seeming ..read more

It’s now 2020. I turned 50 a few weeks ago, and I like to think that in that half-century, I have seen a few things. The biggest surprise for me is arriving at this year and seeing that the world looks nothing like I was told it would be as a kid growing up in the eighties and nineties. No flying cars. No interplanetary travel. No post-apocalyptic battlefields fraught with firefights featuring lasers and photon torpedoes. The teenager in me is a bit disappointed, really. However, the biggest disappointment has been in the development (or lack thereof) of the Canadian financial-services spac ..read more

I have one simple, universal rule that applies to any shopping that I do: I want everything I need, and nothing I don’t. Naturally, this means that I put a fair amount of research into what I am shopping for, and I take the time to consider carefully how the item will be used. The more expensive the item I am looking at, the more time I take, and the more effort I put in. This process ensures that the money I eventually end up spending is aligned to both my direct needs, as well as my values. After all, why spend the money for a Mercedes, when a Chevy will get you to the grocery store just ..read more

In financial planning circles, longevity risk (the risk that you will live to a very old age and, as a result, run out of money) is one of the toughest challenges to meet with any confidence. The reality is, none of us have any idea when our days will run out. Some people very sadly and unexpectedly pass immediately before or after retirement, while others end up living well into their 90’s. To complicate things, no one relishes the idea of running out of money while they have years, or even decades, of life left in them. Especially for individuals who have led comfortable lives, the idea o ..read more

Economics are one of those things that many people simply choose not to be bothered with. Often the information is dry and boring, and the core data that you really need to see can be hard to find, and hidden in a lot of other unnecessary metrics. But let’s face it, for better or worse the vast majority of the world runs on capitalism, and that means two things: 1) nothing happens without money – the world basically runs on it; and 2) to get money you have to compete, and you have to win. Economics is really the study of how money works, and is very helpful in determining who’s winning ..read more

For most, if not all, of us, there will eventually come a time when we need to have a discussion with a financial professional. Whether it’s an accountant, a bank employee, an insurance agent or a financial planner, sooner or later we are going to end up in a position where we are face-to-face with another real-live human and wanting help. Having spent years as one of the people providing that help, I have seen all the different ways people approach this interaction, and I have some definite thoughts on what works and doesn’t work when it comes to getting the help and service you want and ..read more

“Planning Tales” is an occasional feature where we look at real-life client circumstances that I have encountered over the years, and what those clients have to teach us about financial management. Names and some details are altered to protect privacy. When we look at the world of personal-finance writers, I have noticed somewhat of a tendency for each writer to want to be “right,” especially when it comes to investing. For instance, I was involved in a discussion on Twitter recently regarding gold. One individual in particular held the opinion that gold is useless as an investment and sho ..read more

Debt-free living is one of those topics that most people feel they have a handle on. Instinctively, we all know it’s better to be debt free than to carry a lot of debt. And yet, time and again we see reports that North Americans are taking on more and more debt. Could it be that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the impact debt has on our personal finances? Are we underestimating the extent to which debt impairs our ability to realize our financial goals? Table of Contents Are We More Inclined To Carry Debt Now Than We Were In Years Past? The Financial Benefit To Debt-Free ..read more

There’s an awful lot of noise being generated around the investment industry in Canada. It’s as if everyone agrees that, somehow, the system is broken, but no one can quite agree on what the problem is, or how to fix it. Unfortunately, in my view, the anger is often misdirected, and in the absence of a clear understanding of what’s broken, it’s hard to imagine that a fix will happen any time soon. To try and maybe clear the air a little, I’d like to offer my take on what I think is the point of failure, based on my many years of experience in the industry. Hopefully, we can figure out both ..read more

There’s been a lot written recently that seems to suggest, sometimes quite forcefully, that if you make use of a financial planner or advisor (for the purpose of this article, I’m going to stick with financial planners specifically) you’re basically not very bright.  A great example was recently published by Perpetual Money Machine that takes a very common, but incorrect, approach to this opinion, to wit: a financial planner can’t possibly provide market-beating returns, so they are a waste of money. On the face of it, that seems like a logical argument. But every time I see it being ma ..read more