Investing and Personal Finance
From the monthly archives:
At the beginning of the year I entered in a stock picking competition with some other bloggers. As I outlined in my original 2010 stock pick post I bet the house on the price of gold falling. Well, it hasn’t fallen and as was pointed out in the comments of the original post, I didn’t [...]
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Jay is a new writer here at Four Pillars – read his introduction post here. Time is a valuable commodity. Every day, I spend 8 hours preparing myself to spend the remaining 16 ones as richly and as fully as possible – and make no mistake, I do spend time. For as Benjamin Franklin once [...]
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Find out the best high yield savings account. Wealth and Socioeconomic Class | Million Dollar Journey How do you say “bubble” in Chinese? | Canadian Capitalist Discretionary Investment Management : WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo.com Time Management Tips Intelligent Speculator | Top Stock Picks: Dividend ETF’s Michael James on Money: Misalignment of Interests on Wall Street The Bad Credit [...]
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Eliminating the middleman is never as simple as it sounds. ‘Bout 50% of the human race is middlemen, and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated. -Malcolm Reynolds (Firefly) The Internet removes middlemen. In many ways, this is the core of the wealth it has created, by putting buyers and sellers directly in touch with [...]
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My parents are in the process of getting their RRSP accounts converted to RRIFs (Registered Retirement Income Fund) since they are turning 71 this year. After answering a few of their questions I thought I would do a post covering some of the basic rules and strategies of converting a RRSP account to a RRIF account. [...]
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“Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein is a book about how presenting choices in a different way can lead to widely differing proportions of people making each selection. At the very beginning they present an experiment where a nutritionist running cafeterias wanted to provide student with the [...]
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Jay is a new writer here at Four Pillars – read his introduction post here. Today we’re going to figure out my financial budget by breaking down all the money that I earn and then try to see if I can explain where it all goes. Net Income After taxes, I earn roughly $1000 a [...]
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We recently got an e-mail (summarized below) from a reader asking for advice about a situation with her parents. “My parents have worked hard their entire life but never saved a dime. As they approached retirement, they worked as the resident managers for an apartment building. They have very minimal savings, and the small amount [...]
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Do you know what a zero-based budgeting system is? Basically it is a budget where you track every single dollar of income and each single expense down to the penny. This is a great system for someone who is trying to get a good handle on their spending since they will be able to see [...]
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Some time ago Mike and his wife exchanged comments about having tenants pay off your mortgage. My mother takes the same position as Mrs. Pillars does: tenants paying off your mortgage is a good thing. With respect to both frighteningly intelligent women, I’m suspicious this is a poor way to think about the investment. Say [...]
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A few years ago when I was on a big asset allocation kick, I bought some REITs (real estate investment trusts) for my RRSP account. The amount was only about 5% of the portfolio but according to the experts, having some real estate is a good diversifier. While I accept the idea that REITs are [...]
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Credit card companies understand that everyone likes to be receive rewards. They have created hugely popular rewards programs that offer incentives for consumers to remain loyal to one credit card. This concept is not new and was first introduced to consumers in other industries as early as the late 1800′s. Today loyalty or reward programs [...]
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Just a heads up that the maximum contribution limits for the Canada pension plan (CPP) has new values for 2010. CPP maximum pensionable earning and maximum contribution amount For 2010 the maximum pensionable earnings will be increasing to $47,200 (up from $46,300). What this amount means is that you will contribute to the CPP based [...]
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The EI premiums have gone up for 2010 (no surprise) so I thought it would be a good idea to go over the new amounts. Here are the 2007 EI premiums if you want to compare. First of all the maximum insurable annual earnings has gone up from $42,300 to $43,200 which means that for [...]
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I’ve seen almost every Michael Moore documentary. I like his movies and I like his persona (he seems like he’d be a lively guest at a dinner party). I certainly don’t agree with all his politics (but, then, I can’t think of anyone I *do* agree with all their politics). Recently Preet did an interview [...]
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We recently bought a Dynex portable dvd player for my son to use in the car on long trips. This isn’t something that I really wanted to do since I grew up in the era of playing road kill identification games and making fun of people in other cars to help pass the time on [...]
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Some time ago Preet, Mike (& Mrs Pillars) and I got together for some yummy Thai food and adult beverages. At one point I was expressing skeptism about something, and Preet wryly responded “Skeptical? You? No, never!” While I’ll leave my own personal skepticism as an issue between myself and the team of psychologists in [...]
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The tax free savings account (TFSA) has been available to Canadians for over a year now. One of the benefits of being a year older is that you now have another $5,000 of contribution room available to invest in your TFSA. If you turn 18 in 2010 then you only have a maximum limit of [...]
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Recently I was discussing with my wife an idea she had for an online business. One of her hobbies is genealogy, which is basically researching your family tree so she had the idea of offering a genealogy research service for money. I don’t know if this business idea will ever get going or not, but [...]
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I recently wrote about my experience buying an iPhone from Rogers. To summarize: when I called, I had only planned on trying to get the $35 activation fee waived. I was fairly confident I’d be able to accomplish this since I’d read online that it was fairly common for new clients to get this. To [...]
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