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Yesterday, my neighbour’s son was over for a visit. He’s a twenty something living in Newmarket, ON and working in construction. He is doing quite well for himself and was recently chosen to be trained as a foreman. We started talking about how frustrated he was with the price of real estate in the Toronto area and how we was […]

One of the best books I’ve read on passive or index investing is The Elements of Investing by Burton Malkiel and Charles Ellis. The book is full of proof that buying mutual funds is a losers game for us, the investors. One point they discuss that is not widely considered is the significant capital gains taxes that mutual fund investors […]

The financial industry likes to scare people into saving more money than necessary. The pitch goes something like this: If you don’t save 15% of your working income, you may run out of money before you have the good sense to die. They do this because every dollar you save, they shave off 2 or 3 percent for themselves. It’s […]

Short answer. YES! Here’s the math. According to Morningstar, a financial website that knows everything about mutual funds and index funds, the average mutual fund in Canada has a Management Expense Ratio of 2.5%. That means for every dollar you have invested with this fund, they take 2.5% away each and every year. So if you give them $1000 in […]

Lots of people dream of being able to retire before age 65. Not only can working be stressful, it may not be that much fun. It definitely can’t compare with your vacation time, which for many people, if how they imagine retirement will be. If you are convinced that early retirement is for you then you will need to save […]

Easy recipe for investing success: Save 10% of your income. Every once in a while buy the Vanguard product with the symbol VGRO. Do this over and over again, every year for 40 years and there’s a really good chance you won’t have to worry about money when you stop working. It seems so simple.  This is the sort of […]

Part of the plan to retire well requires you to save 6% of your income each and every year of work between the ages of 25 and 65. This advice came from actuaries who studied the spending habits of Canadians during their working and retirement years. The 6% figure, it was concluded, meant that Canadians could save enough for retirement […]

In a previous blog post, I wrote about how successful dividend investing has been in the past 20 years in Canada.  I wanted to provide a little more colour on how dividend investing has performed vs. index investing so I did a little number crunching to see which stocks outperformed the S&P 500 and which did not.  I looked at […]

In a nutshell, some stocks and all government bonds are expensive today, probably because interest rates are so low. That pushes investors to buy stocks and bonds which means that future returns will probably be lower than they were in the past 25 years. Canadian and European stocks are actually not too over valued especially compared to US stocks. Canadian […]

Many Canadian investors believe that you can obtain market beating returns by investing in companies that have a long history of paying dividends. It’s even better when these companies are increasing their dividends year and after year. In Canada, suitable stable dividend companies are found in a few sectors like financial services (banks and insurance), utilities (electric and pipeline), food […]