This is a funny one I got from Ken Kivenko who is a tireless advocate for the small investor up against the giant mutual fund industry. You can read his monthly newsletters at Canadian Fund Watch . Ken says he received the following message signed as the branch manager of a member firm of the Mutual Fund Dealers Association: “Mr. Kivenko, please stop sending your Newsletter to my clients Mr. ----- and Ms. -----. Since they have been receiving your rag they constantly pester us about fund fees, returns and how our Seniors Specialists are paid. The more they read the more anxious they become. They are elderly and your stories are scaring them. It is now virtually impossible to even approach them about our new line of proprietary funds because of your rantings. The next thing I know they'll be asking about alternative investment choices. Our sales team is worried this will spread. STOP sending this material NOW! Have a good day.” This is too funny for words, which makes me th...

A reader I’ll call Jeremy has a question about how to handle the HST for his practice that he operates with a partner I’ll call Sandy. Here is the situation: Sandy runs a business offering an HST exempt service out of an office she rents. The service Jeremy offers is not HST-exempt. Because Jeremy offers a different but complementary service to the public, Sandy suggested that Jeremy offer his service out of Sandy’s office space. To keep the arrangement simple, Sandy suggests that Jeremy pay her 40% of his revenues, and Sandy will provide the office space, supplies, computers, etc. without any further charges. The idea is that Jeremy will just keep 60% of his revenues. The complication comes with how to handle the HST. Jeremy must charge his clients the HST, but how should it be split between Jeremy and Sandy? Possibility #1 Sandy only gets 40% of Jeremy’s base rate and gives all of the collected HST money to Jeremy. Jeremy then remits the HST money to the government ba...

I made a change to this blog that should go unnoticed by most readers. I now have my own domain (http://www.michaeljamesonmoney.com/) instead of the blogspot address. Although I’ve set it up to automatically refer from the blogspot address to the new address, I’d be pleased if those who point to my blog from their own web sites could update the addresses. Readers of my feed should see no substantial changes. Thanks to Frugal Trader at Million Dollar Journey for the advice on how to make this change smoothly. Now, on to this week’s short takes. It’s been a quiet week, but I found a couple of interesting articles. Big Cajun Man has a list of things to stay away from in the post-Christmas sales. My Own Advisor reviews the ebook The Dividend Toolkit .

The word “millionaire” is mainly used loosely to mean a person with so much money that he or she can spend far more than the average person with no fear of ever going broke. Increasingly, this loose definition does not match up with the more precise definition of a person with a net worth of at least $1 million. Consider the hypothetical couple, Sam and Christie, both 56 years old. They met working for the same employer and have 3 children, two of whom are still attending university. Their employer is having tough times and they both got forced into early retirement. Unfortunately for them, their skills are mostly useless now that the entire industry they worked in has collapsed. Fortunately, though, they are collecting a defined-benefit pension of $5500 per month. Using a rule of thumb that an indexed pension is worth about 15 years’ worth of payments, their pensions have an actuarial value of $990,000. Sam and Christie live in a house worth $450,000, but their mortgage is $...

With apologies to the blog Give me Back My Five Bucks , I say to Google, give me back you can keep my ten bucks! That’s how much they charged me for a service that I can’t get finally got to work. This all began with the many complaints I get from people who say that their employers block all blogspot links, so they can’t see my blog. I’ve been trying for a while to figure out how to fix this, but the only advice I ever get is that I should move to WordPress. However, I get frustrated enough fixing problems that come up with Blogger. My family would disown me if they had to endure my ranting about having to fix WordPress problems. Besides, I don’t want more features; I just want some simple blogging features to work without constant attention from me. I poked around in Blogger settings and noticed a publishing option to “Add a custom domain”. This seemed too good to be true. Clicking on it led me to an offer to sell me my own domain for only $10 per year. So I pulled out ...

Canadian Mortgage Trends explains how wrong Amanda Lang is about the ability to forecast interest rates and how quickly they can rise or fall. Preet Banerjee interviews Financial Advisor John DeGoey who has some very blunt words to describe the state of the financial advice industry. Canadian Couch Potato explains how the cost of currency conversion has nothing to do with current fair exchange rates. Million Dollar Journey gives a snapshot of where he is with his RESP, which is based on TD e-Series mutual funds. He also lays out his complete RESP strategy for shifting from stocks to safe investments as his children approach the end of high school. Big Cajun Man says that store-fronts for the telecom companies like Bell and Rogers are no-ops in the sense that they offer little of value over visiting the company’s web site. Increasingly, low-level employees of businesses have almost no discretion to make any decisions themselves. Business strategies are created at the cor...

People who play the lottery generally know that their odds of winning are very low. However, some ticket buyers I’ve spoken to believe (or hope!) that they’re bound to win if they keep playing long enough. I decided to do some simulations of the Lotto Max lottery to examine this belief. I ran a million simulations of playing 2 tickets per week for 25 years. At $5 per ticket, that’s a total cost of $13,000 for each of a million lottery players. I included all the gory details about how the prize pools are determined, winning a free ticket when matching 3 numbers, and everything else. A simplifying assumption I made was to treat all chosen number combinations as random instead of having some of them chosen by people. I also had to make assumptions about ticket sales: I chose sales of $25 million per draw when the previous jackpot was won and sales of $15 million more than the previous jackpot when it wasn’t won. This crudely models the hysteria that comes with big jackpots. ...