Around the Blogosphere

In 2012, personal finance commenter Preet Banerjee wrote a piece for the Globe & Mail debunking a widely quoted research paper on the value of financial advice. The study, published by the CIRANO group, reported that “on average, participants retaining the service of a financial advisor for more than 15 years have about 173 percent…

I’m a die-hard football fan but even I’ll admit that it’s getting tougher to follow the game with the same religious fervor that I once had. The NFL is plagued by many issues, including domestic violence, racial division, substance abuse, and player injuries resulting from repeated head trauma (which the league ignored or denied for…

This week my wife and I finally tried online grocery shopping and home delivery. What a game changer! We shop bi-weekly at Costco for the majority of our groceries and household supplies. In between it’s a mix of No Frills, Safeway, and Save-On Foods for fresh produce and other items we seem to need regularly…

Vanguard founder and index investing pioneer John Bogle passed away this week at the age of 89. Bogle was a legend in the investing community for driving down costs for individual investors. His flagship index mutual fund, now known as the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, amassed just $11 million when it was introduced in 1976.…

Want to know if money can truly buy happiness? How about a brutally honest and refreshing look at money and happiness? That’s what author Melissa Leong has in store with her new book called, Happy Go Money. Melissa takes readers along her journey, from frugal beginnings growing up in Winnipeg, to covering the personal finance…

Maclean’s author Jason Kirby wrote this week about Canada’s housing correction, saying, “Canadians are finally getting a taste of what a world with rising interest rates will look like, and one thing is painfully clear: we’re not ready for what happens next.” National home sales are projected to post a double-digit decline when the final…

This year was a challenging one for investors. We’ve been so used to seeing positive gains in our portfolios it’s a shock when markets don’t cooperate! The TSX is down 12.26 percent on the year. The S&P 500 is down 7.03 percent. International markets, as measured by MSCI EAFE, are down 13.94 percent. With seemingly…

What’s the difference between a run of the mill stock market correction and a blood in the streets bear market? By definition a market correction is a loss of around 10 percent over a short period of about two months or less. A bear market is a loss of 20 percent or more and typically…

One of the benefits of tracking our expenses each year is that we can identify spending trends and highlight any areas of concern. One troubling area is our overall household spending, which is on the rise. Those of you with growing families know that there’s the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which has hovered around 2.3…

The investment giant and indexing pioneer Vanguard has made a lot of noise in Canada this year. Already a big player in the ETF space since entering the Canadian market in 2011, Vanguard added four mutual funds to its line-up this year, plus introduced its new asset-allocation ETFs, a one-ticket solution for investors. They’ve also…