I liked Charles Ellis’ book Winning the Loser’s Game so much that I had to read his latest: Rethinking Investing .  It is very short at just over 100 small pages, but is packed with good advice.  Some of it is specific to U.S. tax laws, but most of it useful for Canadians. Ellis takes on three huge areas of personal finance.  The first is your portfolio allocation, or what you should invest in.  The second is your savings plan, and the third is your “spending rule,” or how to spend your assets during retirement.  A detailed treatment of these areas could easily run to thousands of pages, so this book is necessarily at a high level.  Ellis wants you to get the broad ideas right, so that you won’t make big mistakes as you fill in the details. Ellis calls compounding investment returns “your power curve.”  He explains that most of your investment growth comes at the end, which provides motivation to begin early.  Saving is “your first priority.”...

When it comes to big questions about saving and investing, author Nick Maggiulli is critical of the answers given by the financial industry.  In his book, Just Keep Buying , Maggiulli brings data and evidence to answer these questions in interesting new ways.  I find myself agreeing with most of his conclusions, but not always with how he arrives at them or expresses them.  Whether you agree or disagree with his conclusions, Maggiulli adds to the discussion with thoughtful points of view. This book is organized around 21 questions that many people ask, including “How much should you save?”, “Should you ever go into debt?”, "Should you rent or should you buy?”, “What should you invest in?”, and “How soon should you invest?”  The discussion and answer to each question is its own chapter. In the rest of this review, I’ll examine some of these answers. Save what you can How much money should you save?  Maggiulli says to “save what you can.”  On its own, this is...

An organization called Generation Squeeze is calling for big cuts to Old Age Security (OAS) .  For some reason, these cuts are aimed exclusively at senior couples.  Digging into the numbers, the proposal makes no sense. The stated goal of the proposed OAS changes is to free up government money for other priorities.  Whether or not OAS is the right target for reducing government spending is a different discussion.  The puzzling part of this proposal is having all the cuts apply to senior couples. Currently, OAS will get clawed back from any senior whose 2025 net income (Line 23400 of the tax return) is over $93,454.  For each dollar over this income threshold, OAS payments are reduced by 15 cents.  The current rules make no distinction between singles and couples.  The calculation is based on each person’s own income without regard to whether they have a spouse. Generation Squeeze wants to change the threshold to $100,000 for total household income....

Whether you agree or disagree with his arguments, Morgan Housel tells entertaining stories, and his latest book, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life is no exception.  What I liked most about this book is it caused me to think.  Mostly, I agreed.  Occasionally I disagreed.  Sometimes I recognized my own ideas, and sometimes I had something new to ponder.  The book flew by. Most people I know will find that the way they think about spending aligns well with Housel’s recommendations.  The readers who will likely benefit the most are those who give up too much of what matters in their lives to amass wealth.  Such wealth builders are the type of person the financial industry seeks out, and it’s not surprising that writers from the financial industry tend to write for this type of person.  These writers often exaggerate how common it is for the general population to have their type of money obsession.  We all tend to speak ...

The high MERs charged by some employers’ group RRSPs can be frustrating.  But these fees seem small compared to the employer matching of employee contributions.  A recent guest on The Wealthy Barber podcast said “those [group RRSP] fees aren't going to eat that [contribution matching] up over time.”  Challenge accepted!  People, including experts,  consistently underestimate the corrosive effect of high MERs over long periods of time. It’s not my intention to be overly critical of David Chilton or his guest Brian Orlando.  They gave some great information for helping Canadians with their finances.  But I do want to explain how high fees can consume an employer match faster than we might expect. An example The podcast segment began with the example of 2.5% MERs in the group RRSP.  So, let’s compare two scenarios for a hypothetical employee Evan: Group RRSP Evan’s contributions are invested in a crappy closet index global stock fund with 2.5% MER....

Lately, I’ve heard a few references to Dalbar’s measure of how much retail investors underperform the investments they hold due to poor behaviour.  I suspect that if the people making these references understood how Dalbar calculates this measure, they’d be embarrassed at having mentioned it.  There can be legitimate academic debate about the best way to measure investor underperformance, but Dalbar’s simple method is just nonsense. A simple example to illustrate the problem Ann has invested in ABC fund for the past 5 years.  Her initial investment was $10,000.  Over the first 4 years, she left her investment alone and it grew 50% to $15,000.  Ann then got an inheritance of $20,000, which she put into ABC fund to give her a total of $35,000.  In the final year, ABC went up 6%.  Ann now has $37,100. By any reasonable method of analyzing Ann’s investment behaviour, she exactly matched the performance of her fund.  She was always fully invested with ...