All posts by Financial Independence Hub

John Bogle’s 7 tips for successful investing

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Vanguard founder John C. Bogle

Investing is not a one-way ticket to riches. Both novice and expert investors have periods of good and poor performance. Success or failure is driven largely by the markets, but how we behave also has a huge impact.

In a recent article for Financial Analysts Journal, Vanguard founder Jack Bogle summarized the rules for successful investing he developed over his 65-year career. They’ve been tried and tested through different market conditions, and we’re reproducing them here so everyone can potentially benefit.

1.) Invest you must

The biggest impediment investors face is not market volatility, but not investing in the first place. History shows that investing — as opposed to simply saving — is necessary to generate a reasonable return over the long run.

2.) Time is your friend

Investing is a virtuous habit best started as early as possible. Thanks to the “magic” of compounding (simple math, really), even modest investments made in one’s 20s can grow to surprising amounts over the course of an investment lifetime.

3.) Impulse is your enemy

Eliminate emotion from your investment programme. Have rational expectations for future returns, and avoid changing those expectations in response to the ephemeral noise coming from Wall Street. Understand that what may seem like unique insights are typically shared by millions of others. Continue Reading…

What does tax reform mean for high-yield debt?

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By Bradley Krom and Josh Shapiro, WisdomTree Investments
Special to the Financial Independence Hub

In an earlier post, we highlighted the likely impact tax reform could have on investment-grade (IG) corporate debt. In part two, we turn our attention to the high-yield (HY) market.1 While a reduction in taxes should benefit all profitable companies, other provisions could lead to tough choices for some less-credit-worthy borrowers. As we’ve seen during the most recent earnings season, HY still presents a mix of opportunity and risk. Below, we highlight the contrasting impact of lower tax rates and potential changes in the deductibility of interest expenses.

Big Picture: lower taxes, higher free cash flow and earnings

On net, the proposed tax plan is a positive for high yield. Lower statutory tax rates should result in higher profitability metrics, greater free cash flow and a boost to economic momentum/growth, while extending the credit cycle. While all businesses won’t be impacted the same way, we feel comfortable concluding that tax cuts should bias credit spreads tighter for riskier borrowers, on average. Similarly, an increase in economic growth could also push nominal interest rates higher.

What about Revenue Offsets?

While the top-line impacts we highlighted above should be broadly positive, we believe other elements of tax reform warrant closer attention: most notably, the so-called interest deductibility provision.

In the current environment, companies choosing to finance themselves with debt are permitted to fully deduct interest payments. As a result, companies have an incentive to finance themselves with debt as opposed to equity. In order to help dampen the fiscal impact of tax cuts on the federal budget, the current proposal would limit the deductible amount of interest expenses to 30% of EBITDA.

Fundamentally, this provision should have a much greater impact on the HY market. Given that risky borrowers tend to pay higher interest rates and (all else being equal) tend to deploy more leverage, the 30% cap on deductions should impact a larger percentage of the market. As we show in the chart below, HY companies with leverage of approximately 5.5x would likely be unable to fully deduct their interest expenses. In the second chart, we show that this makes up approximately 40% of the total market.2

Market Impact

While attempting to draw broad-based conclusions about individual companies can be tricky, a few key points stand out. In our analysis of firms with public financials, we estimate that 91% of CCCs will be unable to fully deduct their interest expenses. Continue Reading…

What is Personal Finance and why is it necessary?

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By Brenda Cagara

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Personal finance is the art of managing finance individually or for household purposes.

Why would I call it an art? As there are several factors that need to be taken into consideration, the word may seem simple but it is not.

These factors may include purchasing of financial products example, home and life insurance, credit cards mortgages, investments and vehicles: In other words, handling budget, savings, and spending monetary resources over time, taking into account various financial risks and benefits for future life events.

Nowadays, personal finance is regarded as a specialty on its own. Historically, it was taught as a part of home economics or termed as “consumer economics,” which was included as a curriculum in various schools, colleges and university. In 1947, Herbert A. Simon, a Nobel laureate, suggested a decision maker did not always make the best financial decision because of limited educational resources and personal inclinations.

In 2009, Dan Ariely suggested the 2008 financial crisis emphasized the fact human beings do not always make rational financial decisions, and the market is not necessarily self-regulating or corrective of any imbalances in the economy.  Therefore, it is crucial to obtain some basic information about this topic to help an individual or a family to make rational financial decisions throughout his or their lifetime.

Planning Personal Finance

To understand personal finance, one should first have at least a vague idea of financial planning. Financial planning can be defined as a process that requires regular monitoring and re-evaluation of income and expenses. It includes five components: assessment, goals, planning, implementation, monitoring and re-evaluation.

  1. Assessment. Financial position can be assessed by making a balance sheet or personal statement. A balance sheet includes value of all the personal assets and liabilities. A personal statement personal income and expenses.
  2. Setting up small targets acts as an incentive for a person to work hard enough to achieve a financial position is a smart idea. These goals can be divided into short term and long term. Long-term goals may be being retired at the age of 60 with a net worth of $15,00,000, whereas an example of short-term goal may be saving up to buy a new house, a car or a new television.
  3. Once we’ve decided our aims and objectives, we need to have a plan as to how we are going to go about it to achieve it. An ideal plan should include a road map to decrease expenses and a way to enhance earning.
  4. This is the most crucial part of the five steps and in fact the most difficult of all. Once a person comes up with an ideal plan, there should strict implementation of it with discipline and perseverance.
  5. Monitoring and reassessment. With time there are changes in every individual’s life, family and priorities. In order to accommodate these changes the plan will require some alterations over the period of time, making monitoring and reassessment very important.

Personal Finance Tips

1.) A budget is a financial roadmap allows you to live within your means, while having enough left over to save for long-term goals. A simple example of budget can be as follows:

Continue Reading…

Doing it: 50% more income in Retirement

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By Mark Yamada and Ioulia Tretiakova

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Nobel laureate William Sharpe described managing retirement assets as the “nastiest hardest problem in finance.” Living longer on a fixed pool of capital is only the start of a problem complicated by the myriad of possible personal and family needs and obligations that develop over a lifetime.

The need

Demographics are driving big change in the retirement market. Not only will Gen Y workers have fewer opportunities to save for retirement because of high predicted job turnover and reduced access to workplace pensions, but retiring baby boomers are being abandoned by the very industries created to serve them.

The pension, mutual fund and wealth management industries are direct responses to boomers joining the work force, but fewer retiring boomers meet the criteria for investment advisors who are compensated for growing assets. Retiree portfolios don’t get contributions and many are too small to qualify as brokerage minimums rise. Most mutual fund fees are too high for this cohort for whom costs are more important than ever before. The number of advisors is also shrinking, not only because of compensation and compliance pressures but also because advisors too are retiring.

Saving more, starting earlier and taking more risk are the accepted ways to improve retirement outcomes. Two or more of these options may no longer be available for retirees. A growing crisis in retirement savings is stretching an already extended social welfare system and new thinking is needed if disaster is to be averted.

Solutions not products

Our research motivation (Journal of Retirement and two Rotman International Journal of Pension Management papers) is a belief that investing can be improved to solve problems. The pension problem, for example, is best resolved by focusing on what workers really want, reliable replacement income in retirement rather than trying to pick the best performer every period. Consumers today want solutions. The investment industry is still about products.

Just as someone who only owns a hammer sees every problem as a nail, the industry has a singular focus on “maximizing returns.” This sounds good, but anyone using Google maps knows the fastest route to a destination is not necessarily the shortest. UPS routes deliveries to avoid turns against oncoming traffic to reduce accidents and delays waiting for gaps. Their drivers make 90% right hand turns and experience shorter delivery times, lower fuel consumption and operate smaller fleets. What if investment portfolios could similarly be routed more efficiently to correct destinations?

Autonomous portfolios

The self-driving automobile that protects passengers from immediate risks and routes itself to a predetermined destination provides a template for an autonomous portfolio.

Getting to a destination is a different strategy than going as fast as possible all the time. For starters, brakes and steering are needed not just an accelerator pedal. Maximizing returns, the investment industry’s primary approach, is about going fast. If your strategic asset mix is 65% stocks and 35% bonds, your advisor will periodically rebalance to this mix. If stocks go down, she will buy more stocks. This sounds like the right thing to do, and it is, if your investing time horizon is long enough to make back accelerating loses over the next market cycle; your portfolio is throwing money at a falling market after all. For an aging population in general and retiring baby boomers in particular, this is an increasingly risky and unpalatable proposition.

How we can do it

To protect portfolios we keep risks as constant as possible. When volatility rises, some risky assets, like stocks, are sold and less risky ones, like bonds, are added. When volatility falls, we add riskier assets. The critical effect is avoiding big losses. Statistically this is like card counting in the casino game of blackjack. When volatility is higher than average, the deck is stacked against the player. This means we expose portfolios primarily to markets that are favorable. It’s an unfair advantage but it’s legal! Continue Reading…

Should you take early CPP benefits or defer as long as possible?

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By Chris Nicola

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

One question that often comes up about Canada Pension Plan (CPP) benefits is whether to take it earlier or later. If you Google this, you’ll get different answers: some say take it early, others say take it later. It seems the experts don’t quite agree, so I wanted to do a thorough analysis myself.

Jim Yih explains that the break-even between taking CPP at 60 vs. 65 is at age 77. In other words, if I live past age 77 I’ll be better off my taking CPP at 65 rather than 60. Based on this he concludes that one should probably start taking CPP at 60, just to be sure. However, I’m still left wondering: “Am I more, or less, likely to live past age 77?”

Now, before I dive into the analysis, let me quickly explain how taking CPP earlier, or later, works. Assuming you will be age 60 after 2016, the CPP early and late withdrawal rules work like this:

  • If you take CPP before 65, you take a 7.2% penalty per year on your CPP payments (up to 36% at age 60)
  • For each year you wait after 65, you gain an 8.4% increase in your CPP payments (up to 42% at age 70)

On face value, 42% more does seem like a pretty compelling case for waiting, but, is it? The catch here is that, it will depend on how long you live. Will you live long enough to capitalize on the larger payments, if you wait to start taking CPP? The real question is: Are you, statistically speaking, going to receive more, or less, total CPP by waiting?

The hard working mathematicians at Statistics Canada have provided us with this handy table, which shows how long the average Canadian can expect to live until, given they have already reached a particular age. What I’m interested in, is what age the average person at age 60 can expect to live until.

Males maximize CPP at 68, women at 70

Currently, a man at age 60 can expect to live another 23 years (age 83), and a woman about 26 (age 86). As these are averages, they seem like reasonable numbers to use for our analysis, and age 60 is the earliest point at which we are able to consider taking CPP.

Continue Reading…