I’m reconsidering the usefulness of my Friday short takes. When I have something substantive to say about someone else’s article, I’m thinking of just writing a full article on the subject instead of collecting together several links and a few thoughts. If you have any opinion on this, feel free to comment on this post. I’ll make a decision next week. I had a full week of posts: Stop Over-Thinking Your Money It’s Time that Renting Got a Little Respect Common Sense on Mutual Funds A Chance to Mouth Off Here’s some weekend reading: Preet Banerjee’s new book Stop Over-Thinking Your Money is out, and he interviewed me for his podcast , all in one week! Andrew Hallam has a very interesting hook for getting kids interested in investing. SquawkFox reviews Preet’s new book Stop Over-Thinking Your Money . Potato has had it with Bell and is considering a jump to Primus for a home phone. I’m interested in feedback about customer experience with Primus home phones (regu...

It was my pleasure to be a guest on Preet Banerjee’s Mostly Money Mostly Canadian podcast this week. If you’re looking for entertainment value, at one point I managed to connect investing to Charles Barkley. Many thanks to Preet for taking the time to talk to me. A big welcome to those who’ve landed here for the first time after listening to the podcast. (I’m in a good mood; welcome to everyone else too.) Every week I write somewhere between one and five articles on any subject to do with money. I tend to focus on personal finance rather than macroeconomic issues, and I use mathematical analysis to (ironically) simplify things as much as possible. My biggest benefit from writing this blog is interaction with readers. I’m always happy to learn something new about how the financial world works. The best ways to ask a question or speak your mind are to leave a comment on one of my posts (scroll to the bottom of the relevant post) or use Twitter where I’m @MJonMoney . Down t...

I wish I had read John Bogle’s book Common Sense on Mutual Funds when the first edition came out in 1999. I might have saved myself a lot of the time and money I wasted trying to beat the stock market. Instead I’ve read Bogle’s updated 10th anniversary edition long after I accepted the wisdom of trying to capture market returns at the lowest cost possible. If any readers are finding their commitment to indexing being poisoned by thoughts of purportedly market-beating strategies, this book is a great antidote. Bogle amasses overwhelming evidence of the mutual fund industry’s failure to help investors capture anything close to the full returns of the market. He lays out so much statistical evidence to back up his case that the reader could benefit from notes at the bottom of pages such as “if you’re already convinced of the current point, skip ahead 10 pages.” The book isn’t just a litany of complaints, though. Bogle lays out his ideas of how a fund company should be run. Thes...

I like owning a house. I’ve become very accustomed to the freedom and autonomy that come from not having a landlord. But I can’t pretend that owning my house is the best move from a purely financial point of view any more. My current home would sell for about 2.5 times what I paid for it. Even factoring in inflation, its value has gone up over 70% in real terms. So homeownership has worked out well for me. But that’s in the past. What about the future? I don’t know what will happen to house prices, but if we look at the likely range of possibilities, the future looks very unlikely to match the past couple of decades. Interest rates are at historic lows and Canadians are deep in debt. I’d have to be delusional to think that my home is likely to increase another 70% above inflation. It’s not impossible, but hardly likely. I have little doubt that I’d be better off financially to sell my house and rent. So far my wife and I have decided to leave this money on the table and...

Most people believe that doing well with personal finance and investing is complicated. Preet Banerjee shows why this isn’t true in his new book, Stop Over-Thinking Your Money: The Five Simple Rules of Financial Success . He says that while it can be a lot of work to get an A+ in how you handle your money, you can get an easy A with his 5 rules, and right now “most people are somewhere near a C–”. ( Disclosure: Preet is a friend of mine. However, as my long-time readers have likely figured out, I say what I really think, even if it involves criticizing a friend’s work or praising a foe’s work. ) The book is written in a conversational style that’s very easy to read. Banerjee explains that while the money rules are easy to understand, they can be challenging to follow the way that it can be challenging to stick with healthy eating and exercising. But the good news is that “getting physically fit is much harder than getting financially fit.” Financially, you only need “disciplin...

I managed a few posts during the holidays, including my (late) jump into Twitter as @MJonMoney : Your Unused TFSA and RRSP Contribution Room is Shrinking! Dragged Kicking and Screaming Study Distracts from Message about High CEO Pay Things have picked up a little compared to last week. Here’s some weekend reading: Loopholes in the U.S. tax code has allowed the wealthiest Americans to save over $100 billion in gift taxes and estate taxes since the year 2000 . These loopholes “make the estate tax system essentially voluntary”. Thanks to the Stingy Investor for pointing me to this one. Canadian Couch Potato reports on another active investment strategy that showed promise initially and then floundered. So often these strategies succumb to reversion to the mean, eventually. And that’s when high investment costs show themselves. Big Cajun Man lists his most read posts from 2013. Million Dollar Journey gives an end-of-year net worth update. Of particular interest t...

Yet again, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a study of CEO Pay in Canada that misleads readers. A quote: “Just as most Canadians are wrapping up lunch break on the first official work day of the year — 1:11 p.m. on January 2 — the average of the 100 highest paid CEOs will have already pocketed what it takes the average Canadian an entire year to earn. All in a day’s work.” If you thought that meant that the average Canadian CEO earns in about 4 hours what the average worker earns all year, you’re mistaken, but I don’t blame you. In reality, the average CEO pay is 171 times higher, which means that it takes CEOs about a day and a half to earn what the average worker earns in a year. The idea is that the CEO was paid for Jan. 1 as well. I don’t see the point of being unclear about this. CEO pay is extreme enough that there is no need to make it look worse. Perhaps the mention of “January 2” was meant to add some clarity, but it doesn’t help much. Only more...