Before reading her latest book “Women & Money,” I didn’t know much about Suze Orman other than the fact that she is a TV personality who talks about money. I wasn’t expecting much from her book but was pleasantly surprised. The book is billed as “for women only,” but this mostly applies to the first 55 pages devoted to motivating women to read (and act on) the rest of the book. If you have thoughts on how useful these 55 pages are, I’d be interested in hearing them; they didn’t really apply to me. The actual financial advice starts in Chapter 6, and most of it applies to men as well. The section on retirement investing (page 115) is particularly good. Much of the detailed advice is intended for Americans, but the broad advice is useful for Canadians as well. Orman recommends that until you are a few years away from retirement, 100% of your retirement money should be invested in stock index funds. She prefers low-cost index exchange-traded funds (ETFs), but considers low-cost ...

When people get into trouble with their debts, they usually have several different debts including credit cards, car loans, line of credit, and possibly student loans. The debts usually have different interest rates and different required monthly payments. Some debts are scheduled to be paid off quickly and others over a long period of time. The idea of a consolidation loan is to borrow one large amount to pay off all of the other debts. For this to make sense, this loan would have to be at a low interest rate and amortised over many years to make the payments low enough for the debtor to handle. To qualify for this type of loan at a low interest rate, the debtor might have to put up some collateral, and this collateral is usually a house. The consolidation loan then turns into a home equity line of credit (HELOC). On the surface, this seems like a good strategy. A lower interest rate means that you pay less interest. What other considerations could there be? I can’t say that I e...