Around the Blogosphere

It was only a matter of time. Air Miles has faced plenty of criticism in recent months, not just for instituting an expiry policy, but mishandling communication to its collectors about the new policy, automatically defaulting existing reward miles into their ‘Dream Miles’ category, not allowing members to transfer miles between their Dream and Cash Miles accounts, hiding…

Greed has a powerful effect on asset bubbles as speculators and insiders try to exploit every available loophole to profit from rising prices. First we had mortgage brokers behaving badly. Then we had shadow-flipping real estate agents. Now The Globe and Mail has exposed a new scheme where a Vancouver real estate speculator is buying homes financed with investor money from…

Back-to-school season is doubly busy for me as our kids enter grade two and pre-school respectively while at my University day job we’re getting ready to welcome back thousands of students to campus this weekend. We all know the cost of post-secondary education has risen dramatically in the last decade and so students (and their…

A decade ago Canada launched Own the Podium to prepare its amateur athletes to reach medal finishes at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. It later expanded to include a division for summer sports called Road to Excellence. The program has been incredibly successful, with Canada winning a record 14 gold medals at the Vancouver games,…

I consider my financial freedom 45 plan to be aggressive, yet attainable. Reaching financial independence at a relatively young age requires discipline, sacrifice, and a lot of savings mixed in with a dash of frugality. But my plan pales in comparison to certain members of the financial independence / early retirement crowd who aim to leave…

Shattered. Shocked. Spitting glass. We had just dropped off our kids at their grandparents’ house for the weekend and were heading back into town to see a movie when, BOOM, the panoramic sunroof in our 2013 Hyundai Sante Fe exploded. Glass everywhere! It sounded like a gunshot. I wondered if something fell out of the…

Do you think you’re an above-average investor? Most of us do, and that’s the premise of Heads I Win, Tails I Win, a new book by Spencer Jakab, the former stock analyst who now writes the Heard on the Street column for The Wall Street Journal. In the book, Jakab refers to Lake Moneybegone, a place…

My employer – acting on direction from the provincial government – is freezing wages for the 2016/17 fiscal year. No salary increase, plus inflation, means that our growing family will actually be earning less money over the next 12 months. It’s a frustrating situation but I’m determined to make the most of it by manufacturing my…

I’m on holidays for the rest of the month and we’re heading out to Kelowna, B.C. to spend our family summer vacation water-sliding and wine-touring in the Okanagan. For the fifth summer in a row we’ve rented a house through vacation rental site VRBO.com. We can find an entire house or condo to rent for about the…