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Retirement, Findependence or Unretirement?

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Chad Smith (FinancialSymmetry.com)

Certified financial planner Chad Smith has written a piece called Retirement, Findependence or Unretirement. Which path are you on?

Safe to say we all know what the word Retirement refers to. Those coming to this website will also know Findependence, a contraction for Financial Independence. Smith credits financial planner and blogger Michael Kitces for pushing for Financial Independence as a more useful term than Retirement, especially for Millennials.

This observation was also made by Alan Moore of XY Planning Network at this blog here at the Hub late in 2014.

I had also made a similar recommendation at a blog I wrote about the same time for Roger Wohlner’s The Chicago Financial Planner.  And on the same theme, I gave a little talk for Toastmasters on this, which I later expanded here at the Hub. Continue Reading…

How the falling loonie affects U.S. equity ETFs

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Depositphotos_40901151_xsAfter the loonie plummeted 2 cents to 81 cents US after yesterday’s surprise interest-rate cut, it seems an apt time to address a common misunderstanding about how the falling Canadian dollar affects US equity ETFs denominated in either country’s currency.

This was nicely tackled a year ago by Dan Bortolotti in his Canadian Couch Potato blog here.

Dan — who is both a consulting editor with MoneySense Magazine as well as an investment adviser with PWL Capital — had been chatting with me about the upcoming MoneySense ETF All-Stars feature in general and about the much-misunderstood topic of currency hedging in particular.

Personally, I believe international securities exposure provides diversification both for stocks or bonds but also currencies. I agree with Certified Financial Planner Fred Kirby (see Getting Help section)  that the first 20% or 30% of foreign currency exposure doesn’t need to be hedged back into your home country (loonie if you’re Canadian, greenback if you’re American). Of course, American investors who bought US stocks then are laughing. Similarly, if a Canadian invested much of their RRSP directly into US stocks or US equity funds denominated in US$ soon after the 2008 financial crisis and didn’t hedge currencies,  they’re probably a happy camper today. Continue Reading…

Rocco Galati’s grass roots movement against Global Financial Powers

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Editor’s Note. First, in the spirit of full disclosure, the guest blog below is by my brother Graham. Second, as the short bio at the end indicates, he is a successful businessman who thinks for himself and isn’t fussed about being perceived as “politically incorrect.” The issue he raises below tends to be ignored by the mass media (he would term them the “corporate media, lamestream media or lackeys of capitalism”).

The Financial Independence Hub is happy to live up to its name and provide a platform to air this intriguing issue. We’d like to think this is the sort of “challenging content” referred to in Tuesday’s blog by Chartered Financial Analyst Andrew Teasdale that’s relevant but seldom found in “ normal channels.”  Findependence.TV plans to run the resulting video of the upcoming event after it is held this Saturday.

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Graham Chevreau

By Graham Chevreau,

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

A Brief Summary of the National Debt

A couple of months ago I watched a YouTube video created by Bill Abram entitled “The Crime of the Canadian Banking System.” In the video, Bill makes use of a very informative Statistics Canada graph showing Canada’s national debt over the period of 1940 to 1987.

The graph shows that Canada’s national debt was below $20 billion over the period of 1940 to 1974. After 1974, however, the graph headed dramatically upwards and, by 1993, the national debt was $423 billon. Bill Abram pointed out that of the $423 billion; $386 billion was interest on debt! Continue Reading…

What do you seek in online financial content? A good night’s sleep, a rude awakening, challenging content?

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Andrew Teasdale (photo: Bruce Redstone)

By Andrew Teasdale, CFA

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

What do people look for in online financial content, especially a site dedicated to Findependence?   Are they looking for technical information on pensions, investments, private equity, complex products, opinion pieces, confirmation of their own decisions or their advisors/advisers, reassurance in times of financial crisis, or something else?

Personally I find basic technical information, beyond a point, boring. You can find basic information anywhere:  just type in the key words into your browser and bam!  Likewise, there are now books galore on every facet of personal finance, so much so that I fear we have long ago overloaded on dry rudimentary comment. Continue Reading…

How to find cheaper air flights

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American Airlines Boeing 767-300An interesting gambit for scoring cheaper airline flights was revealed in this week’s Economist. The short item titled Phantom Fights exposes two methods of exploiting anomalies in the air ticketing system in the U.S. market.

The first is to use a web site called Skiplagged that hunts for so-called “hidden-city tickets.”

The second is a ruse called “fuel-dumping” by which traveller add extra flights to their itineraries that they don’t actually intend to take.

Both gambits have been relatively little-known, according to the article, were it not for the unintended consequence of a lawsuit against Skiplagged’s 22 year old founder. As the newspaper notes, “there are few better ways to draw attention to something than trying to have information about it taken down from the Internet.”