Retirement

Spending money is easy. Saving and investing is supposed to be the difficult part. But there’s a reason why Nobel laureate William Sharpe called “decumulation”, or spending down your retirement savings, the nastiest, hardest problem in finance. Indeed, retirement planning would be easy if we knew the following information in advance: Future market returns and…

There are few personal finance decisions more difficult or complex than the choice between taking a deferred pension in retirement or a lump sum (commuted) value today. It’s a choice many Canadians face each year if they leave a job with a defined benefit pension plan. (If you have a defined contribution pension plan, there’s…

Readers often ask how an index investing approach can work for retirees or soon-to-be retirees. A low cost, globally diversified portfolio of ETFs is great for those in the accumulation stage, but retirees need income. How do they get it? When asked this question I often point to this excellent piece in MoneySense written by…

Retirement can be a scary time for retirees who have considerable and even modest portfolios. We want to protect those assets. And certainly the risk tolerance level for most retirees will drop considerably. And that risk tolerance level will often drive the bus with respect to your allocation to bonds and cash and other risk…

Through most of the five years the Financial Independence Hub has existed, Boomer & Echo’s Robb Engen has been kind enough to allow the “Hub” to republish some of his blogs that first appeared on his own site. He recently suggested we turn the tables and invited me to write a guest blog for Boomer…

One of my very first financial planning clients was a single woman in her late 40s named Rachel who lived in Toronto and worked as a self-employed consultant to the not-for-profit sector. She made good money but lacked the confidence to manage her day-to-day finances and save for the long term. Moreover, Rachel provided care…

It’s perhaps the greatest tax-planning tool available to Canadians, yet RRSPs still remains a mystery to some and are underutilized by many. BMO’s 9th annual RRSP study digs into the data to examine Canadians’ RRSP contribution habits and highlight key trends. Average amount held in RRSP The study found that the average amount held in…

If you’re like many Canadians, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about this whole pension thing we have going on. You know/hope it will be there when you turn 65. You know that a decent chunk gets taken off of your cheque each month (along with a bunch of other acronyms and taxes).…