Canadian Personal Finance News | February 2015

With the start of every new year comes all of those resolutions that you're absolutely, positively, definitely going to tackle. You'll be better at balancing your checkbook. You'll finally kick your retirement savings into high gear. And you're not going to let that financial paperwork pile up again.

In a piece for Slate last week, Helaine Olen took the financial industry to task for their continued push to make financial literacy a priority. She pulled no punches: There's only one problem: Financial literacy doesn't work.

We know how important it is to have an estate plan, including a will, but it's also a good idea to have a thorough letter of guidance to your executor(s) regarding how they should go about finding your assets and dealing with them. Where do you do your day-to-day banking?

We're not quite in "northern peso" territory yet, but the Canadian dollar has taken a beating over the last couple of months. And any time there is a significant move in the markets-whether it's stocks, interest rates or currencies-investors second-guess themselves. Of course, the financial media is always there to support them with hyperbole, overreactions and short-term thinking.

Zone of potential agreement (ZOPA): The area where both you and the person you are negotiating with would accept an offer. When you think about how you're going to earn and save enough money to hit your financial goals, it's really easy to think about how you can cut expenses.

As we return to reality from our 3-week vacation "high," I'm hoping to make the happy feelings last as long as possible. After all, that's what a great vacation is all about! So, better late than never, I'm diving in to review the state of our spending for 2014.

When I thought about it, it became clear that the excuses I'd been using were the same excuses I hear time and time again in financial planning meetings, so I thought for this post, I'd take a "mythbusters" approach and tackle the three most common excuses:

When I help investors build index portfolios they can manage on their own, one of the first steps is determining whether they would be better off with ETFs or mutual funds. Sometimes people balk at the very question. "What do you mean you're considering mutual funds?" they'll ask.

First of all, it's important to differentiate between CPP "pension sharing" and CPP "credit splitting" (officially known as Division of Unadjusted Pensionable Earnings or DUPE). Pension sharing is a temporary sharing of CPP retirement pension benefits between spouses in an ongoing relationship, whereas a DUPE is a permanent splitting of pension "credits," after a relationship has ended through separation or divorce.

You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo - Eminem "Lose Yourself" Face it. Eminem is right. We all have one shot at this investment game. One chance to get it right, one lifetime of investing to save, grow and protect wealth to achieve our goals.

Almost everything we're taught about money is focused on spending it and saving it. Parents, teachers and even personal finance books discuss saving money as keeping it, increasing it and controlling it. Saving money involves figuring out ways to get more of it, to build a bigger cushion.

Last night at the Nasdaq Marketsite, Mark Hulbert and I served on a panel discussion entitled Defend Yourself: Top threats to investors in 2015. The event was organized by MarketWatch and we spoke to a standing-room only crowd of over a hundred individual investors, Dow Jones journalists and other financial industry folks.

If you have made, or plan to make a RRSP withdrawal in 2015, please ensure you set aside the proper amount of income tax to cover any marginal rate “gap”. If you withdrew money from your RRSP in 2014, ensure you receive your T4RRSP tax slip. If you do not receive it, call the financial institution for a copy and don’t get caught with a matching penalty.

Myth: Wealth and freedom come exclusively from living below your means. Fact: Frugality is the first step ... not the last. ~~~~~ There's a couple that I've known for more than a decade. When we met, they were apartment-dwellers, and I don't mean the New York City variety.

I doubt very much you're asking your financial advisor enough questions, and are worse off because of it. I think I've got a handle on why - let me see if any of this rings a bell: You don't have enough time: It's tough to commit time to an appointment when there are so many other things crying out for your attention, let alone committing to another appointment if you don't feel right about the first one.

How much will your financial advisory services cost me, all-in? What will the additional trading costs be, if any, to implement your strategy? What are the internal expenses of the funds you use, if any? What might the taxes on gains or income look like, on average?