Canadian Personal Finance News | May 2014

Just a friendly reminder that effective May 1st 2014, the premium to insure a high ratio mortgage through the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) will be increasing. Here are a couple links to some reference material and a chart outlining the changes. So is this a really big deal?

In any field where complexity is part of the discipline (think: finance, technology, etc.) there is a temptation to appear more sophisticated than others. More specifically, the idea is to appear to know the information that other people do not know and to have a certain cleverness about your approach and how you look at problems. This is fine.

Most people who embrace index investing are attracted to the low fees and the proven performance compared with a majority of active strategies. But another advantage sometimes gets overlooked, and that's the peace of mind that comes from a long-term plan that allows you to ignore the distractions of daily market movements.

The ten most important tasks to tackle when your spouse dies.

As I look outside my window, it's dark, cloudy and pouring rain but just a couple of days ago it was hot and sunny with clear blue skies. As we all know, the weather is very difficult to predict. It changes not just monthly, weekly or daily but hour by hour.

Recently I discovered that I have made a small reporting error on my T2125s for the last 10 years. It's a factual typographical error, not an error in my taxes, thank goodness. Still, I want to get it corrected.

A million dollars? Nope. 70% of your pre-retirement income? Guess again. "How much you need to retire" has a key word in it: YOU.

Bad news, investors. Some of you must fail. Not probably, or unfortunately, but must. Professional, amateur. Hedge fund manager, day trader, indexer, 401(k) saver. Some of you must fail. It's a necessity of how markets work. According to Dalbar and other research groups, the average U.S.

The tendency for mutual fund companies to drop poorly performing funds when calculating historical return data is a major problem for unsuspecting investors, and it's known as survivorship bias. An investor selecting mutual funds today is choosing from a list that excludes the losers that have been either closed or merged out of existence so that their poor returns disappear.