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...

Frederick Vettese has written good books for Canadians who are retired or near retirement.  His latest, The Rule of 30, is for Canadians still more than a decade from retirement.  He observes that your ability to save for retirement varies over time, so it doesn’t make sense to try to save some fixed percentage of your income throughout your working life.  He lays out a set of rules for how much you should save using what he calls “The Rule of 30.” Vettese’s Rule of 30 is that Canadians should save 30% of their income toward retirement minus mortgage payments or rent and “extraordinary, short-term, necessary expenses, like daycare.”  The idea is for young people to save less when they’re under the pressure of child care costs and housing payments.  The author goes through a number of simulations to test how his rule would perform in different circumstances.  He is careful to base these simulations on reasonable assumptions. My approach is to count anything ...

How much money can you save replacing an old high-flow toilet with modern low-flow toilets? My house is old enough that we still have toilets that use about 13 liters per flush 1 instead of the modern standard of 6 liters or less. (I bet some readers landed here hoping to catch me using “literally” incorrectly. Maybe they have caught me. I’m literally flushing away something I have to pay for (water), but I’m not literally flushing coins or bills. It’s an important debate to have while I’m somewhere else.) New dual-flush toilets use either 6 liters or 3.8 liters per flush depending on whether it is a big or small flush. This makes the water savings either 7 liters or 9.2 liters per flush. In my limited experience, low-flow toilets need more second flushes than my old toilets require. Combining this with the fact that small flushes are more frequent, I’ll call the savings an average of 8 liters per flush. For my 4-person family, I estimate that we flush about 20 times per...