For the first 30 or so years of working, saving and investing, you’ll be first in the mode of getting out of the hole (paying down debt), and then building your net worth (that’s wealth accumulation.). But don’t forget, wealth accumulation isn’t the ultimate goal. Decumulation is! (a separate category here at the Hub).
Determining your financial priorities is like having a battle between your present and future self. Decisions that make your present-self happy and content might have dire consequences for your future-self.
Conversely, you don’t want to torture your present-self for the chance to be happy and prosperous in the distant future.
We’re raising a young family and with that comes a host of competing financial priorities to balance today. It’s easy to think we can put off saving for retirement, or even the next big purchase, until later in our working years when we’re more established in our careers and the pressures and impact of child care is lessened. But that means screwing over our future selves – making life more difficult tomorrow due to our choices today.
After the initial wave last year of new robo-advisers washing up on the shores of the Canadian market comes a variation on the theme — a so-called “goal-based” online investment management service called Invisor.ca.
Announced Tuesday, the service claims to offer “personalized online investment management at a fraction of the cost of a traditional financial advisor.” The service is available initially in Ontario and Manitoba and it plans to register in other provinces “in the near future.” The custodian is Credential Securities Inc.
The reference to traditional advisors is evidently to mainstream retail mutual funds, whose fees are high enough that all domestic robo-advisers can undercut them and still make money. In a press release, Invisor notes that many Canadians pay more than 2.5% a year for mutual funds and that “in some cases these costs can be s high as 2.8% to 2.9%.” Continue Reading…
Today’s Hub review is a bit unusual in that we’ve allowed an author to review her own book. I originally reviewed No Hype: The Straight Goods on Investing Your Money when it came out almost a decade ago and found it a useful addition to the genre, seeing as so many financial books these days are written by financial professionals.
It was refreshing to see a book written by a pure financial consumer like Gail, who like the rest of us has to sort the financial wheat from the chaff and has no real axe to grind. As she says on her web site, she’s an independent voice.
Hopefully we’ll review it in the more traditional manner over the coming weeks or months but in the meantime, it’s nice to know the book is still out there and has been revised.
Incidentally, and as noted in Saturday’s weekly wrap, Gail and I are among six speakers at The Financial Show in Mississauga later this month. Joining us will be Gordon Pape, Pat Bolland, Jim Ruta and Scot Blythe. — Jonathan Chevreau
By Gail Bebee,
Special to the Financial Independence Hub
Gail Bebee
When I set out in 2006 to write the original No Hype – The Straight Goods on Investing Your Money, my goal was to create a readable book that set down all the investing basics for Canadians, without a financial industry bias. It was born from my frustration at not finding such a book when I decided to take control of investing my money.
Thousands of books and two sold-out editions later, the students taking my Investment Planning night school course at Toronto District School Board still need a good reference, and retail investors are still looking for an objective, understandable book on all the investing basics written expressly for Canadians. Continue Reading…
Can you be happy without ambition? That’s probably not a question many of us ask ourselves, but it was posed by Joe Udo the other day at his Retire by 40 site: Can you be happy without ambition?
I don’t know about Joe’s professed lack of ambition but in my view, achieving early Findependence by 40 and running a web site about how you did it qualifies as ambitious. And as I’ve often argued, such activities really do not constitute retirement in the sense of doing absolutely nothing all day long. Joe and the many other Early “Retirement” gurus are still working, and from what I’ve experienced the past year, are probably working pretty hard. Same with writing books and giving paid speeches. It’s still work but there is some freedom being outside the corporate gilded cage.
For years Canada’s big banks have walked all over their retail customers without fear of repercussion. They’ve raised account fees and hiked minimum balance thresholds at will, invented new charges for moving our money around, and generally nickel-and-dimed us to death just because they can.
Banks get away with it because of the perception that it’s difficult and inconvenient to switch. Typical Canadians, we grumble about the fee grab for a while, then quietly return to our normal everyday routine.
But this time it feels different. While banks continue to enjoy record profits – particularly from their retail banking operations – consumers are paying higher fees and earning lower interest on savings deposits. Continue Reading…
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