Weekend Reading: The Power Of Anti-Goals Edition
The self-improvement market is estimated to be worth more than $10 billion in the U.S. and $40 billion globally. Indeed, there’s no shortage of books, blogs, and online courses designed to boost your productivity and life satisfaction. Hey, if morning routines, vision boards, and setting smart goals gets you motivated to make positive changes in…
Read MoreMental Accounting and How We Spend Money
We all have quirky behaviours when it comes to managing our money. One trick we fall victim to is called mental accounting. We separate our money into different types of mental accounts, with different rules, depending upon how we get it, how we spend it, and how it makes us feel. An easy example is…
Read MoreWeekend Reading: London Edition
Welcome to my latest edition of Weekend Reading. I’m writing from our flat in London, whilst enjoying a coffee on this beautiful Saturday morning. We’re on day four of our 24 day trip to the U.K. that will soon take us up to the Lake District and then into and around Scotland. London is an…
Read MoreDo You Need A Financial Navigator?
I get really nervous when driving in strange places. The anxiety comes from my poor sense of direction – I could get lost in a phone booth. My wife, on the other hand, makes a fine navigator. She could be trapped in an underground cave and still tell which way is north. We didn’t plan…
Read MoreNet Worth Update: 2022 Mid-Year Review
Stocks went down. Real estate went up. Yet I sold stocks to buy real estate. Welcome to 2022, where things no longer make sense. That’s right, we made a big decision earlier this year to purchase a lot and build a new house. Once we decided we were serious about taking this step (as…
Read MoreWhat’s Up?
No, I’m not asking how you’re doing (sorry, I know everything sucks right now!). I’m talking about your investments. Active managers love to tout their ability to capture all of the upside of the market while deftly avoiding the downside. We know empirically that is not the case (the SPIVA scorecard shows that more than…
Read MoreWeekend Reading: House Building Edition
I got a three-month head start on working from home after I quit my full-time job in December 2019. At first, I worked from a laptop at the dining room table. It wasn’t ideal, especially when our kids were sent home for online school. We later carved out a section of the kids’ playroom and…
Read MoreStop Checking Your Portfolio
We’re nearly halfway through 2022 and the year has not been kind to investors, to say the least. Global stock markets are suffering their worst prolonged losses in recent memory. The S&P 500 is down about 18.5%, international stocks are down about 17%, and emerging market stocks are down about 15%. Domestic stocks have fared…
Read MoreWeekend Reading: Breaking Up With Your Advisor Edition
I recently coached a client through the process of transferring her existing RRSP, TFSA, and non-registered investment accounts away from high fee managed mutual funds and over to a self-directed investing platform. The goal was to reduce investment fees from an average of 2% on her balanced portfolio down to 0.25% with a balanced asset…
Read MoreTime To Check In On Your Financial Plan
I quit my full-time job in December 2019, three months before a global pandemic shut down the world. I watched my investments fall by 34% in the sharpest and most rapid market decline in history. I cancelled two European vacations. While I did get a three-month head start on the whole work-from-home thing, my routine…
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