Listly by Sandi Martin
June's list of the best Canadian personal finance news, articles, and blog posts from around the internet, expertly curated for interest and relevance. You can follow this list right here in List.ly, by following me on Twitter (@sandimartinspf), or by signing up for Spring in your inbox here: https://springpersonalfinance.com/contact/
"The ultimate freedom is a free mind, and we need technology that’s on our team to help us live, feel, think and act freely.
We need our smartphones, notifications screens and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. People’s time is valuable. And we should protect it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights."
Saving for retirement means navigating a potential minefield of high fees and bad advice.
"Simply put, Monte Carlo simulations provide a well where you can develop sequences of random market returns fitting predetermined characteristics, in order to test how financial plans will perform in a wider variety of good and bad market environments."
"The public discussion of investing suggests a different order. Although things are changing, historically fund companies, advisors, and the media have spent more words on asset allocation--and more yet on security selection--than on either costs and contribution rates. Such is the nature of the beast. More can be said about technical matters than on items as simple as saving more and spending less, particularly when the people doing the saying are technicians.
Also, costs and contribution rates can be awkward issues. Understandably, those who are paid to give investment advice can be reluctant to pound that table too loudly, unless (as with Vanguard) cost is among their competitive advantages. Contribution rates present the opposite problem. Because advice givers profit from additional assets, they must be careful when advocating higher savings rates lest they be seen as acting in self-interest."
"If your advisor’s answer to the potential for corrections or volatility is to sell you silly shit from outer space, then your follow up question should be whether or not he or she gets paid for the privilege of your having bought it."
"Using the updated dataset through 2015 and the perfect foresight assumption, the calculated SAFEMAX meets or exceeds 4% in Sweden (4.5%), Canada (4.4%), New Zealand (4.1%), Denmark (4.1%), and the United States (4%)—only five of the twenty countries."
"Tax plans, investment plans, and estate plans are tactical plans, not strategic objectives. No retiree really wants an estate plan, we want to efficiently transfer our terminal wealth to our heirs and that strategic objective probably demands some kind of estate plan. We don't want a tax plan, we want to meet our strategic spending objectives and that probably requires a tax plan, the point being that we want to satisfy our major strategic objectives and these tactical plans are means to achieving those ends, not ends themselves. They belong in the appendices."
May's list of the best Canadian personal finance news, articles, and blog posts from around the internet, expertly curated for interest and relevance
Fee only/advice only financial planner at Spring Financial Planning, ex-banker, curmudgeon.
Co-host with the really loud laugh on Because Money