A friend I’ll call Sam is in a situation that is new to me. He was in a car accident some time ago and has been trying to claim medical costs from an insurance company. The insurance company ignored him for a long time and recently offered a settlement that would close the matter. The problem is that the settlement appears to be taxable. Sam has already paid $1200 so far in medical costs. The insurance company has offered to pay $1500 to settle the matter, leaving Sam to pay any remaining medical costs on his own. Sam is inclined to accept the offer rather than fight any longer, but the settlement documentation claims that the $1500 would be taxable to Sam. At a 46% income tax rate, Sam would only get to keep $810 of the settlement which is less than the $1200 he has already paid. My first thought was to go back to the insurance company and ask them to cover his expenses so far ($1200) and pay an additional $300 lump sum to settle all other costs including any future costs. ...

Canada Mortgage News reports that Zoocasa has a new free property valuation service called Zoopraisal. It was able to give me a value for my house. I don’t know if the appraisal is accurate, but it’s a start.  Update: a friend who keeps a close eye on real estate prices says that Zoopraisal is close in some cases, but in at least one case it was low by nearly 20% even though the house had just sold for the higher price.  He suspects that it didn't take into account special circumstances that make a house more desirable than others fairly close by.  Hopefully Zoopraisal improves over time. The Blunt Bean Counter has some useful details on who needs to report to the U.S. IRS. Many snowbirds don’t realize that they have IRS reporting requirements if they stay too long. Preet Banerjee reports another good reason to avoid day trading: machine reading of news. It’s hard to act on news first if computers are acting on it in a split second. Big Cajun Man went to th...

Elaine Kurtenbach reports that there are signs that the red-hot Chinese real estate market is cooling off. Real estate prices in China have risen consistently for so long that people have come to believe that prices only go up. Our situation in Canada is much milder, but there are parallels. On a recent trip to China I happened to discuss housing prices with some PhD students. They talked about how their families were buying as many apartments as they could as investments. When I asked whether they were concerned that Chinese real estate might be in a bubble and that prices could drop drastically, they looked at me like I had two heads. It was clear that their perception of the safe path to wealth was to save money and pour it all into real estate. There are many Canadians who feel similarly. They buy homes bigger than they need on the theory that they will make money when they sell these homes. But there are no guarantees. It is better to buy the home you need, pay it off,...

Scotia iTrade was the first online brokerage to offer commission-free ETF trading and now Canadian Couch Potato reports that Qtrade is offering commission-free ETF trades as well. Saving money on commissions this way is a good thing, but it can mask problems. I find trading similar to drinking: they’re both fun, make me feel good, and cost me money. I try not to be too anxious to get duty-free booze at the border. I have no problem with saving money, but I worry that if cheaper bottles of booze makes a significant difference to my finances, maybe I’m drinking too much. Getting back to ETF trading, it’s better to pay nothing than something, but if you’re really saving a lot of money with free ETF trading, maybe you’re trading too much. There are other hidden costs of trading that are less apparent than commissions. You pay half the spread on each transaction and you pay for trading against better-informed investors, some of whom have inside information (or at least informatio...

Canadian Couch Potato explains how criticism of leveraged ETFs should not be applied to all ETFs. Retire Happy Blog explains how to save on your taxes with flow-through shares. This is a guest post by The Blunt Bean Counter . Big Cajun Man explains why RESPs are killing trees.

I tend not to pay much attention to the tools offered by discount brokers, but BMO Investorline has introduced a new ETF screener and comparison tool for its customers. With the increasingly muddied landscape of ETFs available in Canada and the U.S., a screener is potentially useful. The tool includes the ability to compare the performance of an ETF to an index. This is useful for checking an ETF's tracking error. Index ETFs are supposed to track an index, but many do so poorly. A quick comparison can tell you how good a job a particular index ETF is doing. Note: As far as I am aware, this screeneris only available to BMO Investorline clients in their online accounts. I'd be interested to hear what others think of this new ETF tool.

A decade ago, the Tyco company took a big fall and they were sued for allegedly overstating their financial results. The result of the litigation is that there is a $50 million pot of money to be divided among Tyco investors who held stock during the critical period. I mentioned a while back that I'm trying to get access to my share . I had thought that being Canadian rather than American would be a barrier, but seems not to be a problem. The real challenge has been to get my evidence of being a shareholder accepted. I have all the relevant records, but I twice got responses saying that my claim "has been wholly rejected" due to certain "defects". They keep asking me for records of a transaction on 2003 March 14. Explaining that I made no transaction on this date didn't help. During a telephone call with a pleasant person, I learned that I need to produce proof that I still owned shares on this date. I'm not sure how I was supposed to understa...