Around the Blogosphere

For many Canadians, owning a home is a sign of personal and financial success – a rite of passage signalling that you’ve made it on your own (maybe with some help from mom & dad). Just over two-thirds of Canadian households own their home, which puts us ahead of countries like the United States, Australia,…

One of the more interesting economic fallouts from the global pandemic is the impact it’s had on used car prices. Rental car agencies sold a good portion of their fleets when global travel shut down last spring. A semi-conductor shortage has slashed the production of new vehicles. Now that travel is slowly returning, rental car…

Do-it-yourself investors face a number of behavioural hurdles when it comes to building an investment portfolio. We look to past performance to guide our future investing decisions – ignoring evidence that yesterday’s winners often become tomorrow’s losers.  We disregard decades of research that shows how low cost investing through passive index funds beats active stock…

Most travel rewards credit card issuers hit pause on their generous welcome bonus offers when the pandemic shut down global travel last March. What good are perks like airport lounge passes and priority boarding when nobody is traveling? American Express consistently offers some of the most generous benefits, including luxury travel perks with its iconic…

Canada’s housing market continues to defy logic as prices have shot-up more than 40% on average across the country. Last spring, then CMHC boss Evan Siddall predicted that home prices would fall between 9-18% due to the economic impact of the pandemic. So, what happened? One reason is that high income earners working from home…

Canada’s big banks rollout new fee increases every year or two. These fee hikes may seem innocuous at first – 50 cents here and $1 there – but they collectively (and annoyingly) add up to big bucks over time.  My advice for Canadians who want to remain with a big bank but don’t want to…

House prices across the country continue to soar. The average price for a home in Canada reached $695,697 in April, up an incredible 41.9% year-over-year. Ontario is driving the majority of those gains, as the province’s average price rose 46% during the same period. Would-be homebuyers are getting into bidding wars and paying several hundred…

FP Canada issues guidelines every year to help financial planners make long-term financial projections for their clients that are objective and unbiased. The guidelines include assumptions to use for projected inflation and investment returns, wage growth, and borrowing rates. It also includes “probability of survival” tables that show the life expectancy at various ages. The…

Active investors supposedly thrive during periods of market volatility. If that’s the case, then 2020 should have been a banner year for active funds. The year started off strong, with markets hitting all-time highs in February. Then we saw the largest and fastest market decline in history with a 34% sell-off in March. Markets then…

Welcome to another edition of Weekend Reading. I continue to receive a ton of emails from readers and clients about investing, retirement, real estate, and more. I’ll answer some of those questions here in this special Money Bag column. We’ll look at investing in a rental property, rebalancing RESPs for older children, the limitations of…