Every once in while, a really great book comes out. If you only read one financial book this year, I highly recommend The Number by Lee Eisenburg. In a nutshell, The Number is about formulating your personal retirement strategy not just the monetary nest egg. What makes this book so unique is that it isn’t [...]
A great summer read I recommend is The Naked Investor, by John Lawrence Reynolds. It’s a must for every investor’s library. This book details real-life stories on the dark side of the investment world where unscrupulous advisors have taken advantage of the investor, for their own personal gain. It’s a tough read for any advisor [...]
Annuities are an under-utilized product for those seeking consistent stable income, regardless of stock market conditions. In simple terms, an annuity can be thought of as the opposite of a mortgage for a home. With a mortgage, a financial institution gives you a specific amount with which to purchase a home and in turn you make regular [...]
In my last article, I introduced the concept of annuities. In this article, I’ll introduce a very intriguing concept, the “insured annuity”. It took me a few times seeing this concept presented to fully understand it, so if at first glance it seems complicated, that’s understandable. Where is it used? The insured annuity is alternative to [...]
Continue reading about On a Fixed Income? Give Yourself a Raise!
One of the simplest financial planning steps you can do is to complete a Net Worth Statement each year. Your Net Worth is simply a snapshot of the difference between what you own (your assets) versus what you owe (your liabilities). Click here for a sample Person Net Worth Statement as an excel spreadsheet. I downloaded this sample [...]
With RRSP season having just ended and tax season ramping up, the last thing on most people’s minds right now is planning for their retirement. Whether you do your own investing on-line, use your local bank, broker, or a financial planner do you know your “Number”? Experience shows that many people don’t have a good [...]
Traditional mutual funds are set up in a “trust” structure. When you make a purchase, you buy “units” of a specific fund, for example, Fund A. However, if you decide to sell Fund A or switch to Fund B, outside a registered plan you incur a deemed disposition. If there is a profit, you’ll have [...]
Continue reading about Tax-Effective Investing with Corporate Class Mutual Funds
If you invest in mutual funds, have you ever wondered how your funds get classified? What’s makes a fund, for example, a Canadian Balanced Fund, in the first place? That’s where the Canadian Investment Funds Standards Committee (CIFSC) comes in. As stated on their website (http://www.cifsc.org) “the primary purpose of the committee is to provide [...]
In June 2006, I attended the Morningstar Investment Conference, which focused on “Retirement Income Planning”. One well-known speaker, Moshe Milevsky, introduced the concept in retirement planning of not just how to generate retirement income in your portfolio by having a proper asset allocation (a mix of cash, bonds and equities according to your risk tolerance) [...]
Continue reading about The new kid on the block…the Variable Annuity!
As a financial planner, I often observe when I meet prospective clients for the first time is their lack of an emergency fund as part of their cash management plan. Why do we need an emergency fund? At anytime, we could experience a situation where our cash flow cannot meet the demands due to an [...]
Continue reading about Your Cash Management Plan: The Emergency Fund
