Friday, September 20, 2013

Short Takes: Renting Out a Room, Floating Rate Notes, and more

Here is my post for this week that drew quite a few reader comments:

One Thing Investors Must Do for Themselves

Here are my short takes and some weekend reading:

Potato does some analysis to show that renting out part of your house doesn’t help all that much to make Toronto’s high house prices more affordable.

Dan Hallett points out problems with floating rate note (FRN) funds that some investors like because they don’t have to lock in long-term fixed rates and suffer if interest rates rise. The trouble is that these funds carry significant risk that isn’t properly reflected in fund risk ratings.

Big Cajun Man had some post-dated cheques stolen from his son’s school which led to him paying several stop payment charges. A fee of $12.50 seems manageable until you have to pay it 10 times, but not 11 as his bank tried to charge him.

Million Dollar Journey answers a reader question about which type of investment account is best for holding Canadian index ETFs.

3 comments:

  1. Oh, I don't know if I'd break out fancy words like "analysis" for that particular post, especially given what else I threw out there last week. That's just a quick bit of friendly math and angry ranting that is.

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    1. @Potato: I'm giving you credit for finding the right way to think about the value of renting part of a house and how it affects the price of house you can afford. I'm always more impressed with simpler analyses.

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  2. It was that I had to clean up the problem over the phone (again), that irked me. Good jibbering with you at the conference, too bad we both got pneumonia from the A/C on the train.

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