Suze Orman dropped out of the spotlight a few years ago, but she’s back with the book The Ultimate Retirement Guide for 50+: Winning Strategies to Make Your Money Last a Lifetime .  The book contains solid financial advice for retirees and near-retirees.  The advice is aimed at Americans, but Canadian readers can easily skip parts that aren’t relevant in Canada.  Surprisingly to me, some of the best parts of the book aren’t directly about finances. My favourite chapter is “Where to Live.”  It begins “I imagine some of you are thinking you might breeze right past this chapter.”  I was skeptical initially, but the advice is excellent.  The main choice we will face is whether to live out our lives in the same home or move somewhere else. Orman explains the many advantages of moving somewhere more suitable for an older you, but she recognizes that many people are determined to stay in their homes.  If you plan to stay, you should consider making changes to...

Savvy investors know they pay fees to invest in mutual funds and Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs).  Most of these costs are captured by the Management Expense Ratio (MER).  MERs are calculated by taking the fees charged in a year and dividing by the total fund assets.  By focusing on annual fees, the MER percentage is misleadingly low.  What really matters is how much of your money goes to fees over a lifetime of investing. For someone who begins investing at age 30 and lives to 85, the total investing period is 55 years.  However, the portfolio is small initially and may be small late in life.  When it comes to the cumulative effect of fees over a lifetime, what matters is how long the average saved dollar is in your portfolio from the day you save it until the day you spend that dollar and all the returns it has produced.  For a nice round figure, I use 25 years as the average holding period for saved retirement dollars. This gives rise to the Management...

Ben Stein has an interesting short book called The Capitalist Code: It Can Save Your Life and Make You Very Rich .  He aims it mostly at young people as a combination of financial advice and a defense of capitalism. The advice part of the book is essentially to save some money to invest in stocks as a way to hitch a ride on the incredible wealth generation capitalism provides.  He says that when “we hook up our lives to the mighty engine of capitalism,” we’re generating wealth to deal with the wide array of uncertainties in life. On the subject of employment, Stein “will always advise working at one loves,” and “we might as well be prisoners as work in jobs we loathe.”  I agree with this to an extent, but we have to meet the world halfway.  If all the people who love painting landscapes tried to make a living at it, 99% would starve.  You have to choose among jobs that have some hope of paying enough money to live. To those who might doubt the benefits of capita...

There are many factors that can affect your decision on whether to take CPP at age 60 or 70 or somewhere in between.  Here I do a case study of my family’s CPP timing choice. Both my wife and I are retired in our 50s and had periods of low CPP contributions because of child-rearing and several years of self-employment.  So, neither of us is in line for maximum CPP benefits.  If we both take CPP at age 60, our combined annual benefits will be $11,206 (based on inflation assumptions described below).   The “standard” age to take CPP is 65.  If you take it early, your benefits are reduced by 0.6% for each month early.  This is a 36% reduction if you take CPP at 60.  If you wait past 65, your benefits increase by 0.7% for each month you wait.  This is a 42% increase if you wait until you’re 70. However, there are other complications.  If you take CPP past age 60, any months of low CPP contributions between 60 and 65 count against you unless you c...

You might have noticed I’ve written quite a few book reviews lately.  The books I had on hold at the library were taking a long time to become available (maybe because of the pandemic), so I put more books on hold.  But then they started showing up in bunches.  I’m barely staying ahead of the return dates.  You can expect more reviews in the coming weeks as several of the books I have out now are about money. Here are my posts for the past two weeks: Bond Quiz Value Averaging Mom and Dad, We Need to Talk Napkin Finance Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: Preet Banerjee interviews Multi-Level Marketing “survivor” David Pride who needed 3 years of therapy to de-program his brain when he left.  I know there’s a cult aspect to many MLM schemes but had no idea it was this powerful. Mark Burgess has a sensible take on when to start your CPP.  He also points out the conflict of interest financial advisors have when they advise on CPP timing. Just...

When it comes to money and finances, it seems like everything we learn is more complicated than we hoped.  The book Napkin Finance: Build Your Wealth in 30 Seconds or Less by Tina Hay offers very short overviews of a wide range of financial topics.  The format is appealing in some ways, but it’s an American book and much of the content isn’t relevant to Canadians. The book covers a wide range of financial topics, including compound interest, credit, investing, college costs, retirement, taxes, GDP, and Bitcoin.  Each begins with the image of a napkin with drawings overviewing the subject.  Then there are a couple of pages with further explanations.  The format felt gimmicky at first, but it grew on me.  Before people can understand the many details and subtleties of an area, they want a quick understandable overview for context. The book contains lots of humour to help hold readers interest.  One of my favourites was “A hedge fund is a fee structure i...

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Cameron Huddleston’s book Mom and Dad, We Need to Tak: How to Have Essential Conversations with Your Parents about Their Finances , but I was pleasantly surprised.  It’s well written and contains lots of practical advice about the steps we need to take to make it easier to help our parents as they age.  The book is U.S.-centric, so some of the more detailed advice is less useful to Canadians, but is still well worth a read. A common theme throughout the book is that some steps with helping your parents need to begin long before they need help.  I’ve been in the position of rooting through a house full of papers trying to figure out what accounts there are and what bills need to be paid.  I can only imagine how much worse the experience would have been if I didn’t have a power of attorney document prepared in advance. It’s tempting to decide that there’s no need to do anything right now because your parent or parents are fine.  H...