Finding The Hidden Gold In Your Tax Return
While most people use a tax program to complete their tax return, the program is only limited to the information you enter and you may not be fully maximizing your tax refund. As an accountant, I come across plenty of small credits that are often overlooked by people because they aren’t aware they apply or…
Read MoreWhy You Should Eliminate Debt Before You Retire
Conventional wisdom – and a good rule of thumb – suggests you should not have any debt when you retire. However, a recent Globe and Mail article reports that people are more comfortable with carrying debt into their retirement years than past generations and that more than half of all retired Canadians are carrying some…
Read MoreWeekend Reading: Earn Save Grow Edition
I started a new blog a few weeks ago (as if I didn’t have enough on my plate). Earn Save Grow is still very much a personal finance site, but it will focus less on frugality and more on topics like how to increase your income, and how to save wisely in the areas that…
Read MoreWhat Could You Do With $5 A Day?
Back in 1913, the assembly line workers at the Ford Model-T plant in Detroit were paid the princely sum of $5 a day. Henry Ford wanted reliable workers, but he also assumed they would want to buy the Model-T themselves, rather than taking the streetcar to work. It would still take some serious saving to…
Read MoreOur $35,000 Basement Renovation: Why We Paid Someone Else To Do It
One of the regrets we had with our first home is that in the eight-and-a-half years we lived there we never got around to finishing the basement. We vowed not to make the same mistake when we built our new home nearly three years ago. So after we had the basement framed last summer we…
Read MoreTangerine: Update On The Bank Formerly Known As ING Direct
When we last checked in with ING Direct CEO Peter Aceto he said the company had until May 2014 to shed the ING name and rebrand itself. The online bank was purchased by Scotiabank in November 2012 and recently announced its new name – Tangerine – which is ready to officially launch on April 8th,…
Read MoreRandom Musings: Beating The Index, Do What You Love, And More
I read a lot and often come across ideas and concepts that are not really explained to my satisfaction. Here are some things that I often think about. Beating the Index Many financial writers and advisers are touting the benefits of the passive investing strategy of an index-based portfolio for low cost and good performance. …
Read MoreWhy Age-Based Savings Benchmarks Are Dumb, But We Look Anyway
Whether it’s healthy or not, we all make comparisons in many aspects of our lives – where we live, what we do for a living, what kind of car we drive, even how we raise our kids. But society doesn’t talk openly about money and so we look to the experts to set benchmarks and…
Read MoreWeekend Reading: Cognitive Bias Edition
Lately I’ve been interested in behavioral finance – the effect our emotions and inherent biases have on the financial decisions we make. How many of us have been reluctant to sell an investment at a loss, and rationalize that we’ll sell once it “comes back” and we break even? That type of behavior is called…
Read MoreWhat Are You Saving For?
We all know that part of smart financial behavior is to get into the habit of saving a portion of your earnings. The “rule of thumb” for savings is 10% of gross income. Many save for a “rainy day,” or “nothing in particular” rather than towards any specific goal or focus. Everyone has different goals,…
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