Around the Blogosphere

I mentioned we are building a new house, which we hope will be finished by spring 2023. It was a stressful time to sign a purchase agreement with a builder. We wanted to arrange our financing so that the new house purchase was not contingent on us selling our existing home (been there, done that,…

The self-improvement market is estimated to be worth more than $10 billion in the U.S. and $40 billion globally. Indeed, there’s no shortage of books, blogs, and online courses designed to boost your productivity and life satisfaction. Hey, if morning routines, vision boards, and setting smart goals gets you motivated to make positive changes in…

Welcome to my latest edition of Weekend Reading. I’m writing from our flat in London, whilst enjoying a coffee on this beautiful Saturday morning. We’re on day four of our 24 day trip to the U.K. that will soon take us up to the Lake District and then into and around Scotland.  London is an…

I got a three-month head start on working from home after I quit my full-time job in December 2019. At first, I worked from a laptop at the dining room table. It wasn’t ideal, especially when our kids were sent home for online school. We later carved out a section of the kids’ playroom and…

I recently coached a client through the process of transferring her existing RRSP, TFSA, and non-registered investment accounts away from high fee managed mutual funds and over to a self-directed investing platform. The goal was to reduce investment fees from an average of 2% on her balanced portfolio down to 0.25% with a balanced asset…

I quit my full-time job in December 2019, three months before a global pandemic shut down the world. I watched my investments fall by 34% in the sharpest and most rapid market decline in history. I cancelled two European vacations. While I did get a three-month head start on the whole work-from-home thing, my routine…

Buongiorno! We’ve spent two glorious weeks in Italy, arriving first in Rome before moving on to Florence and Venice. Three very different, yet equally amazing cities! I loved the history of Rome. We toured the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Vatican, ran through Circus Maximus and along the Tiber, tossed a coin into Trevi…

A good percentage of Canadians would prefer to invest in real estate (either through their primary residence or by purchasing an investment property) instead of investing in the stock market. There’s even a perception that real estate is less risky than stocks. Couple that with massive gains in house prices across the country and it’s…

Nobel Prize winner Harry Markowitz famously said that “diversification is the only free lunch in investing.” For investors, that means diversifying their portfolio across different asset classes, different sectors, and different geographies. The goal is to reduce risk without sacrificing return. Sounds easy, right? Investing can be simple, but it isn’t always easy. Think about…

Investors should lower their expectations for future stock returns. I’ve been saying this for a while now, but it bears repeating again now that stocks have gotten off to such a rocky start this year.  Markets are largely efficient and tend to go up over the long term. But they can certainly overshoot expectations in…