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Part of the plan to retire well that I’ve been espousing on this blog is 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 […]

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 […]

If you are close to retirement, I recommend you try out this retirement spending calculator created by Morneau Shepell, a large Canadian human resource company.  It’s the most involved and accurate calculator I’ve discovered for Canadians. The man behind the calculator is the recently retired chief actuary at Morneau Shepell, Fred Vettese, (author of The Real Retirement, a fantastic book […]

If you spend any time watching or reading about the stock market, I’m sure you will often hear debate on whether now is a good time to invest.  Some will argue that the market is overvalued and is due for a drop, while equally intelligent sounding people will argue the market is not expensive and now is a good time […]

William Bernstein is a well know personal finance writer who tries his best to convince people to save for retirement using low cost broadly diversified index funds.  He has written a few books on the topic but recently released a short e-book for young people who need help investing.   You could read this book and learn quite a bit on […]

First of all, consider yourself lucky that you are one of the few remaining workers in Canada that can still count on a pension plan at work. The once common defined benefit pension plan that paid out a guaranteed amount to a retiree every year until death is quickly dying out. In its place, most employers will offer to match […]

Investing articles can be long and boring.  How about I read the article and provide you with the important information for DIY investing success. Here it is. If you have the misfortune of retiring when the stock market peaks and you see a big decline in your first few years of retirement, the safest way to ensure your money doesn’t […]

Investing articles can be long and boring.  How about I read the article and provide you with the important information for DIY investing success. Here it is: For the past 20 years many Canadians, especially those who live in Toronto and Vancouver has come to be convinced that you can’t lose money in real estate because houses always go up […]