Saturday, April 23, 2016

Short Takes: Self-Driving Cars, Mortgage Complaints, and more

Here are my posts for the past two weeks:

Phishing for Phools

How Much Do You Have to Learn to be a Good Investor?

Replies to Emails I usually Ignore

4 Reasons to Pay Cash for Cars

Here are some short takes and some weekend reading:

Mr. Money Mustache describes his cross-country road trip in a Tesla that drove itself. He also takes a look at how this technology will transform our world.

Canadian Mortgage Trends explains the top three complaints people have about their mortgages.

Canadian Couch Potato offers some clear thinking about target date funds.

Big Cajun Man has some ideas for tricking yourself into saving some money.

Potato looks at the risks and rewards of the “hot potato” investing strategy. It’s not for me but it does illustrate how tempting such strategies can look.

Boomer and Echo give a detailed example of one way to draw an income from your savings in retirement.

My Own Advisor asks what your car says about you. To me cars are nothing more than a form of transportation that say nothing about me or anyone else.

7 comments:

  1. Thanks for the inclusion this week, and congrats on the 6 birdies too!

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  2. Cars: agree with your position. However, it's painfully obvious as to why people tie their identity to their car -- one of the pillars of the modern North American society is the automobile; a car equates Freedom, right? My take...more often than not driving an automobile severely distorts said driver's mentality and/or hyper-accentuates negative/primordial traits. Great for transportation and hauling (but only after a higher limit of range/weight) but most likely detrimental to the over-all health of a community.

    Don't believe me, watch 'Christine'. ;)

    (Interesting to note that over the last few decades, foreign car manufacturers pursued greater fuel efficiency while US builders pursued greater engine power.)

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    1. @SST: Perhaps cars will become more reasonable when we stop owning them individually and we just order self-driving cars from roving fleets.

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  3. Michael. Here is an article by Michael Kitces that you and your readers will find interesting.

    https://www.kitces.com/blog/best-retirement-income-strategy-how-do-you-measure/

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    1. @Garth: That's an interesting article, but I'm not sure why the comparisons use different spending levels. Another consideration is that today's below average dividend yields lead to a lower estimated future real stock return than we've seen in the past. I seriously doubt that a 6% spending level (plus inflation) is sustainable.

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  4. I wonder how long it might be before people just don't own cars anymore? I could see this trend happening in more urban areas over time. As long as we work, we need one.

    Thanks for the mention about my fun post :)
    Mark

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    1. @Mark: One estimate I saw said that by 2030, it would be illegal to "pilot" your own car on public roads and that few people would own car any more.

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