Week 36 | Canadian Personal Finance News

Kids and money. Will they ever learn? Parents, most of whom have had a few financial struggles over their lifetimes, constantly fret about the money minefields out there awaiting their children. We all know the stakes are much higher than they were 20 years ago; today we're facing near record unemployment among the under-30 crowd and often crushing student debt for young graduates.

It's been nearly a year since Scotiabank officially acquired ING Direct, snapping up the online bank for $3.1 billion back in November. Scotia promised to keep its hands off ING's operations, opting to keep the bank as a separate, standalone entity. For the most part, Scotia's been true to its word.

You know, sometimes i have the hardest time putting 2 and 2 together. Lately I have been noticing a lot of information circling the Interwebs talking about Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs).

To simplify my money managing, I turn to technology. Mint.com combines all of my accounts in one place and helps me organize my budgets. I hate spreadsheets, but this app on my phone aggregates all of my numbers and tells me how much I spent on booze last week. Easy peasy.

The Debate over whether Canada should ban trailer fees, the hidden commissions that advisers receive when they sell their clients mutual funds, is intensifying. Since the U.K. stopped the practice in January, the Canadian Securities Administrators have been aggressively pushing for similar reforms here.

Taxes are a fact of life in Canada and something your kids have already experienced as consumers. Have your children ever saved up to buy something and then been surprised that the amount they owed at the cash register was greater than the sticker price?

"It is curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want." -Mr. Spock Once upon a time, I thought I was going to have a company that rehabbed run-down properties in historic districts, scoop up all of the tax credits, which would lower the effective cost of purchasing these properties to 30% of the total cost, rent the properties out, lather, rinse, repeat, and get awesome hair like Donald Trump.

As my buddy put it the other day, "My Facebook newsfeed now consists entirely of wedding/engagement announcements and baby pictures." Getting older kinda sucks Gen Y, what can we say. Friends having babies means friends inviting you to their infant children's birthday parties.

September 2nd, 2013 by Potato ...or Real Estate: Changing Sales Mix and the Effect on Averages. The average is a very important way for us to reduce the complexity of a large number of things down to one measure that we can then compare to other groups of things.

Here's a quote from Andrew Allentuck in this weekend's Financial Post: "If you are paying more in management expenses and commissions than you get in dividends and capital gains over a period of three to five years, consider changing portfolio mix or managers who created the mix."

You sure about that, bud? Many people buy dividends stocks thinking they're safe. But is this really the case? Many people today like to invest in higher yielding dividend stocks. In this series, I explain the reasons why I'm not a fan of this approach. In our last installment, I...

Canadian Personal Finance News List - all relevant news articles and blog posts from week 36 in one place! Enjoy.

Week 35 | Canadian Personal Finance News - In Case you missed what happened last week, here are all the posts from week 35 #CDNFinance

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