Investing and Personal Finance
From the category archives:
This article was written by Rachelle: a real estate guru who works as a property manager and helps investors find rental properties in Toronto and surrounding areas. She has recently started a very interesting blog called Landlord Rescue. You can subscribe to the RSS feed here. In the wake of Mike pulling the controversial post [...]
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I’ve been reading a couple of articles lately about TFSA over-contribution penalties which are being levied against some Canadians by the CRA. These penalties have resulted from people over-contributing to their TFSA (Tax Free Savings Account). It appears there are two main causes for these over-contributions, which will be discussed here. [update June 17] Rob [...]
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Reader Jazzmin26 recently e-mailed me after reading my Mint review and shared my security concerns. She asked for suggestions to “make my financial life simpler and not spent my weekends logging and tracking“. I’ve repeatedly wrote about how valuable I find measurement to be, but I agree with Jazzmin26 that it can sometimes be tough [...]
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Jay recently asked me about getting started as a freelance writer. Kind of ironic since he is now part of the paid staff here at 4P. While I’ve never done freelancing myself, I have hired quite a few of them so I have a pretty good idea what is involved. There isn’t any one obvious [...]
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In my family, I am the night owl. My wife tends to go to bed earlier (although not as early as she used to) and the kids go to bed very early. This means that any noisy activities such as watching movies with surround sound can’t be enjoyed at night in my house because I [...]
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One of Microsoft Windows’ competitors is Linux, a free operating system. Beyond it’s low price, it’s a very stable, reliable system. If I was playing a game or watching a movie, it’s easier to do so on Windows, but if I’m running a web server or an ftp server Linux is far better. While competing, [...]
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This is a guest post by Rat from Ending The Rat race – a good Canadian blog. Check out his site and subscribe to the RSS feed. The Rat is a young investor and entrepreneur hailing from the east coast. After earning a Bachelor of Commerce, he returned home at the age of 21 to [...]
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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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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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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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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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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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If there is one thing I can’t stand is doing taxes. I’ve always done my own taxes and although it wasn’t too much of a chore when my financial situation was simpler it was still a pain. Now I have investment income, investment sales, a small business and things are a lot more complicated than [...]
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This guest post was written by Investing Thesis: Credits Toward Financial Freedom – a personal finance and investing site from a Canadian perspective. If you like this article, I would encourage you to subscribe to our articles You would be hard pressed to find a person without a cell phone in this day and age. [...]
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One of the oldest mantras of customer service is that the customer is always right. I doubt very many companies actually follow that idea since it clearly can’t always be true. And even if it is true then the company still has an obligation to the shareholders to maximize profits even if it means losing [...]
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Recently I wrote about the external flash I bought for my Sony A350 DLSR camera. While the flash itself seemed pretty good, both my wife and I found we really didn’t need it for the shots we take. After a couple of months of not using it I decided to heed Mr. Cheap’s advice and [...]
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This guest post is from PT of PT Money: Real Personal Finance for a Life Without Limits! Check out PT’s latest post about using a joint savings account. PT is a pretty interesting guy with a blog that you should subscribe to. He also has a finance rap video which I featured here a long [...]
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