Weekend Reading: Canada 150 Edition
Happy Canada Day! We hope you all get a chance to enjoy the Canada 150 celebrations happening across the country. We’re driving southwest to Waterton Lakes National Park to hike The Bear’s Hump and take in the beautiful scenery at this UNESCO World Heritage Site. We’ll also check out Red Rock Canyon and hopefully spot some wildlife along the way.
Afterwards, we’ll head back to Lethbridge and close out the night with what should be a great fireworks display.
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This Week’s Recap:
On Monday I posted my mid-year net worth update (it was a good one).
On Wednesday Marie looked at home insurance and five things that your policy may not cover.
The CBC’s Sophia Harris interviewed me for this piece on Canada’s big banks overcharging customers on their investments.
The Toronto Star is shutting down its Star Touch tablet edition after just two years of production. I had contributed to Star Touch’s Smart Money section, but now I’m back on The Star online. Here’s my first column – 5 ways to avoid bank fees.
Weekend Reading:
Rob Carrick offers six reasons to be thankful on Canada’s 150th birthday.
Retirement is about the journey, not the destination. A look at retirement’s changing face.
After decades of saving, paying yourself in retirement should be the easy part. But here’s why turning on the cash taps in retirement is such a science.
Indeed, the complexity of managing retirement investments is something that many retirees cannot handle. Why decumulation is the next critical frontier in retirement planning.
The planning doesn’t stop after you retire. Here’s how to get your retirement planning right.
Shifting gears to investing now and Dan Bortolotti answers a question about how your asset allocation should change over time. New research suggests a constant asset allocation can be effective.
Ben Felix continues his common sense investing series with another look at why it’s so hard to beat the market:
Another reason why it’s so difficult to beat the market is the professional on the other side of the trade. To that end, Dan Solin ponders whether he could take a set from Roger Federer.
If you had to distill the best possible investment strategy to one sentence, you could do worse than the following:
“Keep it simple, and don’t worry about trying to beat the market, because odds are you can’t.”
Financial ignorance, incentives to borrow, and the psychological effects of debt all play a role in our growing debt crisis.
Million Dollar Journey author Frugal Trader breaks down his household spending for all of 2016. That’s nowhere close to my anti-Mustachian budget.
Financially independent Nelson Smith from Financial Uproar talks about motivation, or lack thereof, to move up the career ladder once money is no longer the main driver in your life.
Is home equity sacred? Why it’s time to get over our squeamishness about reverse mortgages.
While there are a number of reasons for a parent to consider passing on a living inheritance to adult children, one that may be overlooked is tax savings.
New smartphone apps aim to diagnose your car troubles before your mechanic does.
Sears is shutting down 59 locations across Canada and here’s an interesting read on what that might mean for the nation’s neighbourhood malls:
“The whole theory of a mall was those department stores, those anchors, would entice customers to the mall in the first place. Then, as customers were going between those two anchors, they would find things to buy at the other stores. The theory started to fail at the same time that department stores started to fail.”
Finally, why Elon Musk’s SpaceX isn’t about cheaper rockets. It’s way bigger.
Have a great long weekend, everyone!
I’m generally a positive glass-half-full person but the article in The Globe and Mail about decumulation is perhaps one of the worst such articles I’ve read on this topic. The “expert” advice is extremely slanted towards a one size fits all approach. For example, they all state that one should defer RRSP withdrawals as long as possible. The obvious caveat is that if you can withdraw RRRSP funds now in a tax efficient way, you should, or at least consider it.
I encourage you to read the article and the comments. It’s within the comments that you’ll get better, more diverse opinions and options.