Whether you’re clipping coupons, shopping at thrift stores, or lining up at Costco to save on gas, the mark of a good saver is someone who is willing to go the extra mile to save a buck or two. While some frugality traits can border on the extreme, others require less effort than you might think.

Take online shopping, for instance. Websites such as Ebates.ca and Great Canadian Rebates offer consumers the chance to earn cash back from purchases made online. Simply pass through these ‘portals’ on your way to retailers like Amazon.ca or TheBay.com, or before you book a hotel room on Expedia.ca, and you’ll not only earn cash back but also often get access to special coupons and discounts.

Here’s how they work:

Ebates.ca

Ebates.ca launched in Canada in 2012. It now has 4.1 million members across Canada and offers access to over 750 retailers. In the last six years Ebates.ca has paid out over $49 million in cash back.

Members earn cash back when they begin their online shopping at Ebates.ca, click through to one of the partner retail sites, like Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, Ebay.ca or Expedia.ca, and then complete their purchase on that site.

Or you can download the Ebates Express Cash Back Button, which hangs out in your browser and provides automatic cash back notifications when you visit participating websites.

Ebates.ca tracks your purchase and you receive a percentage of everything you buy back in cash.

Every three months, Ebates.ca sends members cash back in the form of a cheque or PayPal payment.

Some unique features that help Ebates.ca standout from other cash back shopping sites:

• Gift Card Shop, where members can earn cash back on more than 75 gift cards including gas, groceries, dining, and travel.
• Ebates In-Store Cash Back, which gives members the ability to earn cash back when shopping at participating stores nationally.
• Buy online, pick up in-store.

You can join Ebates.ca by clicking here.

Great Canadian Rebates

Great Canadian Rebates was founded in 2008 and serves an estimated 120,000 customers across Canada. The site lists approximately 500 retailers and up to 700 merchants in total.

Members earn cash back when they begin their online shopping at GreatCanadianRebates.ca, click through to one of the partner merchants, like Amazon.ca, TheBay.com, Microsoft.com, or Hotels.com, and then complete their purchase on that site.

Or you can download the GCR Browser Extension, which sends automatic notifications when you visit participating merchant websites.

Once your online purchase is verified then cash back gets deposited into the member’s account and paid out monthly via PayPal or Amazon.ca gift card. Members can also request a cheque anytime their cash back balance exceeds $30.

Some unique features that help Great Canadian Rebates standout from other cash back shopping sites:

• It’s Canadian owned and operated. (Japanese firm, Rakuten owns Ebates.ca)
• It offers a large marketplace for members to sign-up for credit cards from the likes of American Express, Tangerine, MBNA, or Scotiabank and earn $30 to $75 in cash back rebates.
• A generous referral program. Sign up a friend and collect 15 percent of all Cash Back Rebates your referral collects (per transaction) for the next five years.

I’ve been using Great Canadian Rebates since 2010 when I first heard about the cash back shopping site. I visited the GCR portal on my way to purchase new blinds for our home, and also to purchase a laptop from Dell. I’ve been earning cash back for my online purchases ever since – sort of a habit ingrained in me now whenever I shop online.

You can join Great Canadian Rebates by clicking here.

How do cash back sites make money?

How do Ebates.ca and Great Canadian Rebates make money? Simple. They get a commission from the store whenever their customers make a purchase. These sites then pass along a portion of that commission back to their members in the form of a cash back rebate.

Think of it as a finder’s fee for sending a purchaser (you) to a vendor (the online retailer).

The Verdict

Cash back websites like Ebates.ca and Great Canadian Rebates allow you to shop at all your favourite online retailers and get money back on purchases you would have made anyway.

Ebates.ca offers a greater selection of retailers. For example, my wife quickly noticed Lululemon on Ebates.ca’s list of retailers, but they’re not listed on Great Canadian Rebates. GCR, on the other hand, has a bit of a cult-like following in the credit card churning community for offering applicants up to $75 cash back in addition to any sign-up bonuses offered by the card issuer.

Average savings could get you 1.5 percent back on electronics, 3 percent back on apparel, 5 percent back on hotels, not to mention the deals, coupons, and promo codes added to each site daily.

By making a habit of stopping by these sites first before you make an online purchase, or by using their web browser extensions, a savvy shopper can easily put money back into his or her pocket for very little effort.

No, I’m not starting my own podcast. But I have started listening to a few good investing podcasts lately and I wanted to share three of them with you. I like these podcasts because they’re smart, quick-hitting, 30-minute talks about investing, personal finance, and current market trends.

The first one, which you’ve likely heard of, is Dan Bortolotti’s Canadian Couch Potato podcast. It’s published infrequently, perhaps once a month, but each one is well worth a listen. Dan typically interviews an expert, from financial planners to financial journalists, to investing and real estate analysts. Then he gets into one of the better podcasting segments out there, Bad Investment Advice, where he’ll call out a poor or misinformed article from a major publication (usually with a scary headline like this crap, Are We Headed For A Passive Indexing Meltdown?). Finally, Dan answers a reader question on investing before wrapping up the episode.

Second on my list is the Animal Spirits podcast with Ben Carlson and Michael Batnick, two incredibly smart financial writers who work for Ritholtz Wealth Management. Although U.S. based, Animal Spirits explores everything from financial markets to personal finance, to recent articles and books they’ve read, or movies they’ve watched. It’s fast, funny, and full of interesting tidbits from inside their world of wealth management. Animal Spirits airs weekly.

My latest investing podcast subscription is The Rational Reminder podcast with Ben Felix and Cameron Passmore of PWL Capital. This new weekly podcast started in August and has already proven to be one of the top investing podcasts in the country. Ben and Cameron have a great rapport and they riff on current events related to personal finance, investing, and financial markets, while unafraid of tackling complex topics like factor investing, behavioural finance, and regression analysis on investment returns. Think of Rational Reminder as Animal Spirits North.

Not investing related but an honourable mention goes to the Freakonomics podcast by Stephen Dubner. Like the Freakonomics’ books, the podcast explores the hidden side of everything. You’ll be smarter after every episode.

This Week’s Recap:

Earlier this week I compared one-ticket investment solutions from Vanguard and Horizons. Lots of interest in this super simple investing approach that will likely give the robo-advisors a run for their money.

Speaking of podcasts, I’m excited to be a guest on The Rational Reminder podcast with Ben and Cameron next week. Stay tuned for that and I’ll promote and share it when it gets published.

Next week I’ll also be comparing cash back websites Great Canadian Rebates vs. Ebates.ca to see which one can help put more money back into your wallet from your online shopping activities.

Weekend Reading:

Industry regulators have already proposed a ban on discount brokerages charging trailing commissions to self-directed investors. Trailing commissions are intended to pay for ongoing financial advise from a human advisor, but discount brokerages are not legally able to offer advice and so DIY investors who hold such funds are paying for a service they’re not able to obtain.

Ahead of the proposed ban are now two class action lawsuits against TD and CIBC by investors looking to recoup those fees.

That brings up a heated debate over who is at fault: the industry for knowingly charging investors for services they cannot legally provide, or do-it-yourself investors who shoulder the responsibility of looking after their own investments.

Is investing 100% in an S&P 500 index ETF a smart thing to do? While not a bad strategy, experts suggest diversifying globally.

Ben Felix shares his latest Common Sense Investing video and explains why the 4% rule is probably not the best way to plan for retirement, especially if you plan on retiring early:

Jason Heath helps a reader who is concerned about the tax withholding on his RRIF withdrawals. He’s not sure he’s drawing down his investments properly.

Michael James weighs in on the Financial Independence, Retire Early movement: What does FIRE mean?

He also looks at the interest tax deduction when borrowing to invest, a follow up to a previous post about the Smith Manoeuvre.

Kerry Taylor writes the best way to repay credit card debt is by siding with math over behaviour and tackling your highest interest rate debt first.

Nick Maggiulli offers a different perspective on the global financial crisis. He was just starting his first semester at Stanford:

“Coming back to have my first meal at Stanford in January 2009 was when I realized that the university was taking the crisis seriously. At my first meal back my dining hall ran out of croissants and I couldn’t believe it. While houses were being foreclosed and jobs were being lost by millions of Americans, my version of the recession was my parents losing their home and my university running out of pastries.”

Morgan Housel writes about the lessons of predicting financial markets: Fool me three times and I give up.

Finally, a shocking (but not surprising) undercover investigation by CBC to expose Ticketmaster’s secret scalper program.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

For most Canadians, mutual funds are still the mainstay of their investment portfolios. However, many investors are fed up with high fees that are being charged on mutual funds that rarely match, let alone outperform, the market.

Investing in lower cost exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, seems like a good alternative.

The knock on ETFs is that they can be complicated for do-it-yourself investors to manage and get proper diversification across Canadian, U.S., and International stock markets, not to mention adding the right mix of bonds and knowing when to rebalance it all when markets fluctuate.

A balanced fund, with regular rebalancing and low-costs, would take away this pain point from DIY investors, but up until this year a one-ticket solution didn’t exist within an ETF format.

That all changed when two investment companies, Vanguard and Horizons, introduced their own all-in-one balanced ETFs. Designed to be a one-ticket solution for investors, these ETFs hold an appropriately diversified mix of foreign and domestic stocks and bonds, with rules that determine when and how often the portfolio gets rebalanced.

Vanguard and Horizons: One-Ticket ETF Solutions

I took a closer look at these all-in-one balanced ETF solutions from Vanguard and Horizons, and asked Ben Felix, associate portfolio manager at PWL Capital, to share his thoughts on their suitability inside registered and non-registered portfolios:

Vanguard All-In-One ETFs (VCNS, VBAL, VGRO)

On January 25, 2018 Vanguard launched three “asset-allocation” ETFs that are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and can be purchased through a discount brokerage.

• Vanguard Conservative ETF Portfolio (TSX: VCNS) – Holds 40 percent equities and 60 percent fixed income.
• Vanguard Balanced ETF Portfolio (TSX: VBAL) – Holds 60 percent equities and 40 percent fixed income.
• Vanguard Growth ETF Portfolio (TSX: VGRO) – Holds 80 percent equities and 20 percent fixed income.

Each portfolio consists of seven Vanguard ETFs wrapped up into one product, each representing broad and diversified asset classes across regions and market capitalizations (large, mid- and small).

Vanguard portfolios are monitored daily and rebalanced regularly to ensure they stay within their target weights of plus or minus two percent.

Investors can expect a total management fee of 0.25 percent, including HST.

*Update: Vanguard has recently added two new asset allocation ETFs to its line-up. First is the Vanguard Conservative Income ETF Portfolio (VCIP), which holds 20 percent equities and 80 percent fixed income. Second, there’s Vanguard All-Equity ETF Portfolio (VEQT), which holds 100 percent equities from around the globe. I recently switched my portfolio to VEQT.

Ask the expert on Vanguard:

Felix says that even when you consider additional foreign withholding tax costs, the Vanguard all-in-one products are cheaper than going through a robo-advisor service and investors are getting a comparable portfolio.

“The Vanguard asset allocation funds are good in a taxable account, as good as anything in a TFSA, and fine in an RRSP, though you could do a little better if you want to buy U.S.-listed ETFs in your RRSP.”

Horizons One-Ticket ETFs (HCON, HBAL)

On August 2, 2018 Horizons launched two “one-ticket” ETF solutions that are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and can be purchased through a discount brokerage.

• Horizons Conservative TRI ETF Portfolio (TSX: HCON) – Holds approximately 50 percent equity securities and 50 percent fixed income securities.
• Horizons Balanced TRI ETF Portfolio (TSX: HBAL) – Holds approximately 70 percent equity securities and 30 percent fixed income securities.

Each portfolio consists of seven ETFs from Horizons’ suite of Total Return Index (TRI) ETFs. They use an investment structure known as a Total Return Swap to deliver index returns in a low-cost and tax-efficient manner.

Although initially marketed with a “zero-percent” management fee, investors still pay the cost of the underlying funds and can expect a total management fee of 0.18 percent for HCON and 0.20 percent for HBAL.

HCON and HBAL are rebalanced semi-annually.

Ask the expert on Horizons:

Felix says the make-up of the Horizons ETFs is well suited for non-registered accounts, particularly for high-income earners. That’s because of its unique Total Return Swap structure, which doesn’t actually hold any stocks or ETFs.

“The benefit of this “synthetic” exposure to stocks and bonds is that you do not receive any income from the fund. No dividends, no interest, only the total return of the index as a capital gain or loss. This is beneficial in a taxable account especially for those in a high tax bracket.”

When it comes to diversification Felix does say the Horizons one-ticket funds are not as well diversified compared to the Vanguard asset allocation funds. The Vanguard ETFs are total market funds, whereas the underlying indexes for the Horizons funds are heavily focused on large cap stocks, with minimal exposure to mid caps, and no exposure to small caps.

“The Horizons one-ticket funds are great in a taxable account for anyone taxed at a high rate, but they are probably not worth holding in a registered account, not to mention that they are lacking in diversification regardless of the account that they are held in.”

Final thoughts

For the past three and a half years I’ve enjoyed the simplicity and diversification of my two-ETF portfolio consisting of Vanguard’s VCN (Canadian equities) and VXC (Global equities). I call it my four-minute portfolio because I literally spent four-minutes monitoring and rebalancing it last year. Still, some people called my two-ETF solution too simple.

Is it possible for investors to build a diversified portfolio with just one ETF?

The simple answer is yes. With exposure to global stocks and bonds, these one-ticket solutions from Vanguard and Horizons offer broad diversification at a very low cost. That makes these balanced ETFs an appealing simple and low-maintenance investment option for do-it-yourself investors.